The river in Dave Bonta's "Unleveed" has no name and no banks. The poem gives only "the river," as if there were one and we all knew it, and then spends its few lines insisting that it cannot be held in place. The central idea is that water, and perhaps anything wild enough, outruns every system we build to manage it. The poem even includes "art" among those systems.
The title already carries the argument. A levee is an embankment that keeps a river where people want it, and the prefix "un-" removes that restraint. The double e makes the word look like a past participle, as though something has been done, or undone, to the river. The spelling also sits close to "unleveled," so a faint sense of unevenness may hover over the word, though that is a matter of sound and reading, not anything the poem states.
The first stanza is plain and almost conversational: "the river is too much / to be governed by art or order." "Too much" is how we talk about a person who overwhelms us, so the river gets a personality before anything else happens to it. The line break after "much" lets the phrase stand alone for a moment before the sentence completes. Then comes "governed," a political word, and the pairing "art or order." One is imaginative shaping and the other administrative shaping, and the poem admits that neither will do. The poem is itself a small piece of art, a few lines trying to contain a river, so the admission is quietly self-deprecating. It does not claim to have mastered its subject.
The middle stanza is where the writing tightens: "it riots / sits / seems easy." The political metaphor continues, since a river that cannot be governed riots, like a crowd. The lines shrink to a few words, and the poem seems to stutter or catch its breath. Then comes "sits," a whole line made of one verb. It contradicts "riots" so sharply that the reader has to stop. A river can sit, as water does when it pools or slows, but the position of the word gives that stillness weight and a hint of menace. The stanza ends on "seems easy," and "seems" is the hinge. The calm is only an appearance. "Easy" can also mean easy to handle, so the word hints at the temptation to think a river that looks relaxed can be managed.
The final stanza turns to an image: "unsettled as a crow / in plague time." "Unsettled" works two ways. It means restless, and it also echoes "sits," because to settle is to come to rest. The river sits but stays unsettled, which resolves the contradiction of the middle stanza. The word also repeats the "un-" of the title, so the poem ends where it began. Crows are scavengers, birds often linked in stories with carrion and omens. A crow in a time of plague should have plenty to feed on, yet the poem makes it uneasy, as though the bird sensed that the world was off balance. The poem does not say which plague or when, and that openness lets the phrase suggest any period of sickness and fear. The simile moves us from landscape to creature to an entire era. The river's restlessness becomes a mood of the age, not just a fact of geography.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter, so the form is free verse. The pattern is two lines, then three, then two, with the short middle stanza as the pinch point. The lowercase lines and the absence of any final full stop mean the poem never closes. That is fitting for a river nobody has managed to bank. The sound is quietly watery as well. The s of "riots," "sits," "seems," "easy" and "unsettled" runs through the poem like a hiss of current.
The poem is significant for how much it does in so little space. It could have lectured about nature and human limits. Instead it gives a river that looks calm and is not, and it ends on an unsettled bird, not a moral. It also turns its doubt on itself, since even art fails to govern the river. The poem trusts its reader to feel that the thing we try to contain is always larger than the means we have for containing it.