In about twenty-five syllables, Dave Bonta's "Sailor's knot" sketches a whole life at sea and what is waiting at the end of it. A speaker looks back on "great lies" lived "on board two or three ships," then goes back and finds that the way home is "this very ash." The central idea is a bleak kind of homecoming. A life built on illusions does not end in recognition and rest. The place the speaker returns to has already burned down, in one sense or another, and only its remains are left to claim.
The first stanza is full of small oddities. We usually tell lies, but this speaker has *lived* them, which suggests deceptions that shaped a way of existing rather than a few false remarks. The word "great" is double-edged too. It can mean enormous, but it also has a grand, tall-tale flavour that suits the sea-yarn tradition the title hints at. Then comes the shrug of "two or three ships." The speaker cannot say, or will not say, exactly how many. That vagueness is quietly funny and quietly damning, because a person who cannot count the ships has perhaps not been counting the lies either. The tone stays flat throughout, a confession without drama or self-pity, and the flatness makes it more convincing.
The grammar is where the title earns its place. The poem is one sentence with no punctuation at all, and it opens with a participle, "having lived," that hangs in the air until the second stanza gives it a speaker. The sentence then loops back on itself just as the speaker does ("I go back"), and a knot is exactly that: a line doubled over and pulled tight. The final clause can be read two ways. "Find the way home to be this very ash" can mean the speaker discovers that the way home *is* ash, with "find... to be" working like "found it to be true." It can also mean the speaker finds the way home *in order to be* ash, so that the journey ends in becoming what the fire leaves. The poem never chooses between these, and the tension between them is the knot the reader has to work at.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines run roughly five, six, eight and six syllables, so the third line stretches out as the speaker sets off on the return and the last one contracts again. Yet the poem is not shapeless. The endings "lies," "ships" and "ash" all carry a hissing *s* or *sh*, a sound like water, or like embers settling. "Home" is the only line-ending with an open, rounded vowel, and it is followed at once by the dry little word "ash." The "I" of the third line also echoes the long *i* of "lies" and "find," so the speaker's own identity is sonically tangled up with the falsehoods.
The most striking word may be "this." The speaker does not say "the ash" or "ashes." "This very ash" points at something, almost as if the speaker were holding it up or standing in it. A small, concrete, present thing replaces the large abstractions of "great lies." Its meaning is open. It might be the remains of a house, a fire, or a person, and the familiar funeral phrase "ashes to ashes" is not far away. The poem gives no further detail about which ships or which home, and it is stronger for that. Because the details are missing, the reader has to supply a loss from their own life.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It puts a life of deception, a journey and a reckoning into two couplets, and it refuses the comfort we expect from a story about coming home. Nothing is forgiven and nobody is welcomed back. The confession in the first stanza is the only firm ground the poem offers, and the second stanza shows how little that ground can hold. It leaves the reader with an unsettling thought: you can travel a long way to arrive at what remains.