The word "water" turns up five times in eight short lines, and by the end it has stopped being a substance and become a character. Dave Bonta's "Vita aquatica" ("aquatic life" in Latin) is about giving up one kind of life for another. The speaker begins by observing a world that moves by water and ends by joining it, trading a harp for a shoal of fish. The central idea is that real joy comes from immersion, not from the art that describes it.
The first stanza works like a staircase down into a pool. "All go by water" keeps us at a distance: this is travel, and water is a route. In "talk to the water" the water has become someone who can be addressed. Then comes "desire to get in water," where it is something the body wants. The prepositions "by," "to" and "in" trace the whole move from beside to toward to inside. The articles shift too. Water without "the" is a general element, as in "by water" or "in water." Water with "the" is closer to a person. The poem uses both, so water is at once a physical stuff and a presence you can talk to. The lines also have no subjects, so we cannot tell whether they are commands, habits or confessions. That vagueness lets the reader step into them.
The fourth line, "a dress of ten thousand hands," is the strangest image and the richest. Judging by the context, it may describe the surface of water as it closes around a swimmer, with ripples or waves as countless hands that clothe the body and also touch it. The picture is both an embrace and a garment, and "ten thousand" suggests a crowd, something far too large to count. The water is dressing the swimmer, which is a gentle reversal of the usual idea that we dress ourselves to go in.
The second stanza turns on a near-tautology: "the water received the water." Read one way, this is water welcoming water, perhaps the swimmer's body becoming indistinguishable from what holds it. Read another way, it is rain meeting river, or river meeting sea. Either way, the sentence has nothing but water in it, and the speaker has dissolved into the subject and object alike. What follows is plain and a little odd: "they made a great deal of joy." We usually make noise, or trouble, or a fuss. Here joy is made like a physical product, as if the meeting of waters were a kind of workshop. The plain, almost childlike wording keeps the line from sounding sentimental.
The last stanza supplies the only "I," and the poem pays for it with a choice: "this day I left my harp / for a city of herring." The harp is the traditional emblem of song and poetry, so leaving it behind hints at a poet putting down his craft. The phrase "this day" sounds slightly ceremonial, like a vow. The replacement is a "city of herring," which turns a school of fish into a human settlement, crowded, silver and busy. The speaker gives up one city for another and one music for the music of a crowd of living things. There is a little irony here, since the poem itself is a song written by someone who claims to have put the harp down.
The form follows its subject. There is no rhyme and almost no punctuation or capitalization, so the lines run into one another the way water does. Repetition does the work that rhyme usually does. "Water" returns as a soft closing beat, with its stress on the first syllable and a light ending, like lapping. The lines also grow as the poem goes on, from about five syllables in the opening line to seven or eight in the second stanza, as though the speaker were wading deeper. In the last lines "harp" and "herring" echo each other in their opening and closing sounds, so the thing given up and the thing gained sound oddly alike.
The poem is worth reading because it is so small and still so complete. In eight lines it sets out a whole movement, from watching to wanting to belonging, and it avoids explanation entirely. It treats happiness as something you slip into, and it leaves the reader standing at the edge deciding whether to follow.