Six short lines, three couplets, almost no punctuation: Dave Bonta's "Submariner" looks slight on the page, but it holds a whole vertical world, from the seabed to the stars, with a lonely person suspended in the middle. The speaker dreams of the sea, dreams inside a green chamber full of waterfowl, and admits to being unable to reach a wife. The title does much of the framing. A submariner lives sealed in a vessel under the water, so the poem seems to be about that kind of isolation. It never says so outright, though, and the "chamber" could just as easily be the sleeping mind, which is a sort of submarine too.
The first couplet is odd in a productive way: "I dream of sea / the raw and horrid cod." Someone aboard a submarine is already in the sea, so dreaming of it suggests that being inside a hull is nothing like being in the water. The sea becomes something outside, longed for or feared. The dream doesn't offer anything majestic, either. It gives us the cod, a blunt one-syllable word for a plain, edible fish. "Raw" can mean uncooked, but it also means skinned and exposed, and the harsh *r* sounds of "raw" and "horrid" make the line grate. "Horrid" is a slightly childish word, the kind you might say to a nursery plate, so disgust and strange tenderness sit side by side.
In the second couplet, the dream gets a room: "I dream in a green chamber / ducks and teals coursing through." Green is the colour of water seen from inside, and "chamber" makes that water feel enclosed, like a cabin or a heart. The ducks and teals shift the poem upward. They belong to the surface and the air, and they live in two elements at once. "Coursing" is a word for currents and bloodstreams, and it also hints at a hunt. Then the line ends on "through," with nothing left to go through. The sentence leaks into the white space, and the dream seems to have no far wall.
The poem also hums. Notice the long *e* sound that runs through it: *sea, dream, green, teals, reach.* It works like a held note, or the repeated ping of a machine in the dark. "I dream" opens two lines, and that repetition has the lull of a dream.
Then comes the turn. "I could not reach my wife" is the only line in the past tense, and the only one that makes a flat statement of fact with no image attached. The word "reach" still carries the poem's *e* sound, so it seems to belong to the dream, yet its meaning cuts against the dreamy mood. It can mean touching or contacting someone, and the poem leaves the reader to decide which.
The last line is the surprise: "her thin astronomy." Look back at the poem's direction. The cod are at the bottom, the ducks at the surface, and now the stars are overhead. The wife has been placed at the top of that ladder, in a sky the speaker cannot see from where he is. "Thin" suggests faint starlight and distance, and perhaps also the speaker's weakening grip on her. The word "astronomy" is also a shock of sound. After five lines of short, plain words, it arrives with four syllables, learned and far-off, and the line stretches out like the gap it describes. It is *her* astronomy too. She has a heaven, and he has the sea.
What makes the poem memorable is how much it leaves unsaid. It has no rhyme, no capital letters and no full stops, so it has no firm edges, much like a dream or an ocean with no horizon. The contrast between the thick, bodily cod and the thin, abstract astronomy is the real drama. The poem suggests that separation can turn a loved person into something almost theoretical, a pattern of distant points rather than a presence. It never names grief or loneliness. It trusts its images to do that, and the reader finishes the thought.