Dave Bonta's «Sailor's wife» is only six lines long, and it begins by making a claim about length. "A long word: wait." The word has four letters and one syllable, yet the speaker calls it long, because she measures it in time rather than in letters. The colon works like a held breath. The line stops, and "wait" sits alone at the end, doing what it describes. The title tells us who is speaking: a woman identified only by her husband's trade, who nonetheless gets the first-person voice and the poem's only "I".
The next claim is stranger than we expect: "I understand water / but not ships." A sailor's wife might be expected to fear the sea, but she says she understands it. Water is old, natural and readable, something she can know the way one knows a mood. Ships are built things, and they are what carry a person away. Her bafflement is aimed at the vessel and at whatever it is that makes a person want to leave the land, not at the danger. The stanza break after "ships" leaves a white gap on the page, a small enforced pause, so the form is already waiting before the sentence resumes.
That sentence picks up with "or the poor body," so her list of things she cannot understand grows to include herself. "Poor" can mean pitiable, and it can also suggest something deprived. Then comes the poem's most interesting piece of syntax: "having it in mind to sail / my own bed." The phrase has no firm anchor. Is it the body that has this in mind, or the speaker? The ambiguity does useful work, because it splits her in two. There is a reasoning self that watches and a body that has plans of its own. "Having it in mind" is a mental idiom, yet it is handed to the flesh.
The metaphor is never announced. She does not say "my bed is a ship." She only says she means to "sail" it, and the verb carries the comparison. The word "own" gives the line its ache: the bed is hers alone, and the poem suggests, though it never says, that it was once shared. There is also an irony in the poem's logic. She admits she doesn't understand ships, then sets out to become one. Sailing a bed is a voyage that goes nowhere, and it evokes tossing sheets, sleeplessness and longing. Judging by the phrasing, there may be a quiet erotic undertone too, since the body is the thing that wants to move. If her husband is out on the water, she will make a sea of her own.
The poem's sound is soft and plain. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only two unrhymed tercets with short, breath-sized lines. The *w* sounds of "word," "wait" and "water" run through the first stanza, giving it a low, lapping quality, and the long *a* of "wait" returns in "sail," so the two ideas echo each other across the poem. The long *i* of "I," "mind" and "my" keeps the self at the center. The diction is nearly all one- and two-syllable words. The only three-syllable word is "understand," the very verb the speaker uses to claim knowledge of water, and the rest of the poem quietly takes that confidence apart. The final word, "bed," is a flat monosyllable. After the lift of "sail," the poem docks on a piece of furniture.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it moves in so little space. It takes a stock figure, the seafarer's wife watching the horizon, and refuses the usual picture of a woman on the shore. There is no harbor, no weeping at the window and no storm. The voyage happens indoors, in the mind and the body, and waiting is shown as a restless activity instead of a passive state. The poem also does not say how it ends, whether the bed arrives anywhere or whether the sailing is a comfort or a torment. The long word "wait" stays open, and the reader is left in it a little while.