Five short lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and still Dave Bonta's "Reference point" holds two opposite feelings at once: the wish to be away from other people and the comfort of knowing they are still there. The speaker is out in open country, drinking alone, and the one thing he names as a source of gladness is a town so far off it is barely more than a shape.
The title unlocks the poem. A reference point is something you steer by, a landmark that lets you measure where you are and how far you have come. With that in mind, the town in the last line stops being scenery. It becomes the fixed spot that makes the speaker's solitude measurable. Nothing can be "way in the distance" from nowhere. Being alone out here means something only because there is a town to be alone from.
The grammar rewards a slow look. With no punctuation, the middle line, "I drink alone," works as a hinge. Read one way, the sentence runs "where a flock has troubled the fields I drink alone", a place and an action. Read another way, it runs "I drink alone glad to see the town way in the distance", an action and a feeling. The line belongs to both halves, just as the speaker seems to belong both to the field and, faintly, to the town. A comma would have forced a choice. Leaving it out keeps the poem balanced between the two readings.
The opening word, "where," drops us into a sentence already under way, with the title as our only introduction. The flock is never identified. It could be sheep or birds, and the vagueness lets the word do other work. "Troubled" is the most interesting choice. We usually speak of troubled water or troubled minds, so a flock that "has troubled the fields" suggests ground that has been trampled or stirred up. The present perfect tense implies the disturbance is over and its marks remain, so the speaker arrives in the aftermath. It is also hard not to hear a hint of crowds in "flock." Judging by the imagery, the flock in the field and the town on the horizon quietly echo each other as images of gathered, noisy life, one close and one safely far. The poem never says this outright, but the pairing invites it.
The sound is as spare as the sense. The lines run from three to five syllables, close to the brevity of haiku without following its pattern, and there is no rhyme. Instead the poem leans on texture. "Flock" and "fields" share their opening sounds, while the harder consonants of "drink," "glad" and "distance" give the middle of the poem a firmer footing. The final line is the slowest. Its stresses fall on "way" and "dis-," and it trails off on the unstressed "-tance," so the rhythm fades the way a receding object does.
Two small word choices carry much of the emotion. "Drink" is left unspecified, so it might be water from a stream or something stronger. The phrase "drink alone" has a faint shadow of lonely drinking, yet the setting is open air and quiet, and the shadow never settles. "Glad" is the only feeling the speaker admits to, stated plainly and without decoration. Then there is "way," the casual intensifier in the last line. It sounds like speech rather than poetry, and the speaker's pleasure seems to sit in that small word, as if the sheer remoteness were the point.
The poem's significance lies in that unresolved pleasure. The gladness can be read two ways. It might be relief at the distance, the pleasure of having put the town behind him. Or it might be the relief of a walker who spots a landmark and knows he is not lost. The poem does not choose, and the reader holds both. That seems true to a familiar human feeling: we go looking for solitude, but most of us want to be able to see, somewhere on the horizon, the place we could return to. In twenty-two syllables, the poem shows that the aloneness we seek depends on the company we leave behind.