Six short lines, no capital letters, no full stops, and a morning has already been caught passing itself off as something it isn't. Dave Bonta's "Beachcomber" opens with a simile that sounds like an accusation, "morning like a counterfeit bill", and in the next line steps away from it: "but the sea is the sea." Everything happens between those two statements. The human world of money, games and appearances is full of imitation, while the water simply is what it is. A beachcomber usually hunts the tideline for finds, but this one ends up collecting something that can't be pocketed: the sound of the water.
The counterfeit bill is a sharp choice. A forged note looks right at a glance, crisp and official and promising value, and only disappoints when you try to spend it. The poem never says why the morning feels false, so we have to guess. Perhaps its light is flat and glossy, like fresh-printed paper. Then comes the pivot. "But the sea is the sea" is a tautology, a sentence that says nothing and everything. After a line of comparison, the sea gets no simile at all. It can't be likened to anything because it is the genuine article, and the repeated word works like a stamp of authenticity.
The second couplet is stranger. "A dozen white gloves go quiet / playing at cards." The poem doesn't say what the gloves are. Judging by the setting, they might be gulls on the sand, or foam collapsing on the shingle, or whitecaps, but the image resists being pinned down. What it offers is hands with nobody inside them, a slightly eerie, slightly comic picture, like a row of butlers' gloves left on a table. Gloves also conceal, and card games run on bluffing and sleight of hand, so we are still in the world of the counterfeit. The phrase "playing at" suggests pretending rather than really playing. Then the gloves "go quiet". The make-believe hushes, and the hush makes room for what comes next.
Only in the last stanza does "I" appear, and it arrives late and without fuss: "I walk a while." The phrase is unhurried and has no destination. The speaker listens, "attending the talk of water." "Attending" is a rich word here. It means paying attention, but also being present at an occasion, or waiting on someone, as a servant does. The speaker is both audience and attendant. The water's sound is "talk", not "roar" or "music", so it is ordinary, conversational and unshowy. And "walk" and "talk" rhyme, the poem's only clear rhyme. Moving and listening become one activity, joined by sound.
The poem has no end rhyme and no fixed metre, but its shape is deliberate. Each stanza is a couplet, and the first two pair a line of about seven syllables with a shorter one: "but the sea is the sea", "playing at cards". The last couplet reverses the pattern, with the shortest line, "I walk a while", followed by the longest, which trails off on the soft, falling "water". The sounds shift too. The opening is brittle and clipped, with the hard c and t of "counterfeit" and "but", and the cards and gloves keep that clicking edge in "quiet" and "cards". By the end the words are full of w and l, "walk a while", "talk", "water", which sound like lapping. The poem moves from the sharp and fake toward the fluid and real. The lack of punctuation helps, since nothing is ever shut with a full stop. The poem simply stops, as a listener might, with the water still talking.
The poem is worth reading because it does so much in so little space. Its title quietly redefines the beachcomber's treasure as attention. The first stanza distrusts surfaces, the second performs a trick with them, and the third drops the performance and listens. The poem leaves a lot for the reader to supply, including what the gloves are and what is wrong with the morning, and that gap is part of its appeal. Its argument is gentle: the most valuable thing on the beach is the sea's talk, which costs nothing and can't be forged.