Six short lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and one very ordinary worry: what to do with your legs. Dave Bonta's "Wobbly" is hardly a poem of events, yet it holds a whole scene and a feeling that is hard to name. Someone sits close to someone else, in a way that recalls a first voyage, and discovers that the body has become a puzzle.
The opening word matters. "Where we sat close" begins with a relative pronoun that has nothing to refer back to, so the poem seems to start in the middle of a thought, as if a memory has already been running before we arrived. We never learn who "we" are, or whether the closeness is that of lovers, friends, or family. The poem doesn't say, and the vagueness lets us supply our own. The simile that follows, "like the first time / ever on ship," makes the closeness feel new, as though it were being rediscovered. The missing article in "on ship" gives the phrase a clipped, slightly foreign flavour, as if the speaker were reaching for the right words and settling for the nearest.
That slight strangeness peaks in line four: "I am come to not know." The old-fashioned "I am come" sounds almost biblical, and it implies a journey of its own. The speaker has arrived at not-knowing, gradually, perhaps after years. This line carries the poem's philosophical weight, and it could stand alone as a grave confession. Then the sentence keeps going, and what the speaker doesn't know turns out to be "what to do with / my legs." The drop from the grand to the bodily is funny, but the humour doesn't cancel the tenderness. It suggests that deep uncertainty tends to show up in small physical awkwardness, such as where a knee should go when someone else is near.
The title does a lot of work here. A ship is a place where the floor won't hold still, and "sea legs" are what travellers have to grow. Seen that way, "legs" quietly connects the voyage to the body, and "wobbly" describes both the deck and the speaker. Judging by the imagery, though, the wobble may not be only physical. The speaker is unsteady in the presence of closeness itself, so the one adjective covers balance, nerves, and perhaps age or memory as well. The poem leaves these readings open, and that openness is part of its charm.
The construction is spare but deliberate. Most lines run to about four syllables, short and almost breathless: "where we sat close," "like the first time," "ever on ship." Then line four stretches to six syllables, nearly all single-beat words, "I am come to not know," which slows the voice to a stumble, with stress falling heavily on "come," "not," and "know." The last two lines shrink again, to four syllables and then two. The final line, "my legs," is the shortest in the poem and arrives like a small, embarrassed shrug. The enjambment helps: the line breaks after "with," a weak word that can't end a thought, so the reader hangs for a moment before the answer drops in. The syntax makes us wobble too.
There is no rhyme, but there is some quiet sound-play. "Close" and "know" share a long o, and "ship" and "with" share a short i. Because these echoes are faint, they feel like the accidental harmonies of speech rather than decoration. The lack of punctuation matters as well. With no full stop after "legs," the poem doesn't conclude. The question stays open, and the speaker's unease continues past the last line.
What makes "Wobbly" worth reading is how much it gets from so little. It treats intimacy as something that can make a person feel like a beginner again, awkward and self-conscious about the plainest parts of their body. It does this without sentiment, using a joke about legs to carry a quiet admission that some things never become easier to handle, however long we have known them. For a reader, it is a reminder that a poem needn't explain itself to be exact. It needs only the right small detail, placed at the right line break.