"Settling down" sounds like good news, the end of restlessness. Yet the seven lines Dave Bonta gives us under that title contain no settling at all, only a question about whether it will ever happen. The poem is about the gap between a life of roaming and the daunting idea of committing to a single place, and its central idea is that readiness for that commitment can't be taken for granted.
The first stanza looks back. "I had an intimate discourse / with three or four lands." Both phrases are slightly odd. "Discourse" is a formal, almost scholarly word, the language of conversation and argument, and "intimate" pulls it toward love affairs. Together they suggest a speaker who got to know places the way you get to know people, by talking, listening and lingering. Then "lands" widens the frame. It is not "cities" or "countries" but something older and more physical, territory and soil. The number is just as telling: "three or four." The speaker can't, or won't, give an exact count. That vagueness is casual and a little teasing, as if the past were a blur of attachments too fluid to tally. Nothing in the poem says where these lands are, so they can be read as literal geography or as any set of lives, careers or loyalties a person tries on.
The second stanza turns to the future, and the grammar changes with it. "Will I be wholly prepared" is a question, but there is no question mark. In fact there is no punctuation and no capital letter anywhere in the poem, so the thought drifts without closing, much like the speaker. The word "wholly" is worth pausing on. It means "completely," but it also echoes "whole," and it sets up an irony: to be wholly ready is to give up all but one part of the world.
The next two lines work like a stumble followed by a correction. "To set things in order / to get things in order." The phrases are nearly identical, with only the opening consonant changing from *s* to *g*, and the repetition feels like someone rehearsing a task aloud, trying different verbs to see which one sounds doable. "Set" suggests deliberate arrangement, "get" something more like scraping together. The speaker seems unsure which job is the real one. There is also a faint sound-link back to the first stanza: "discourse," "four" and "order" share the same long vowel and closing *r*, as though the order he hopes to impose is quietly connected to the wandering he is leaving behind.
The lineation does a lot of the work. The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter, but its line lengths narrow as the choice narrows. The three infinitive lines are each about six syllables, then the stanza shrinks to "to take just one," only four, before ending on "particular ground." Notice how the plural "lands" has become singular "ground." "Lands" are vast and abstract. "Ground" is what you stand on, the footing underneath you, and perhaps also a "ground" in the sense of a reason or foundation. The verb "take" is also telling. It sounds less like love and more like claiming or accepting a portion, and "just one" carries a faint note of loss. Placing "just one" and "particular" at the line breaks makes the reader feel how small a single patch is beside the earlier plurality.
The poem is also deliberately unfinished. It ends on a heavy, flat word, "ground," which is as close as it comes to landing, but it is the object of a question, not a statement of arrival. The speaker may be settling in imagination only.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. In about thirty words it shows a familiar adult dilemma, the pull between freedom and rootedness, without sermonizing and without picking a side. The tone is dry and quietly humorous, and the doubt is real. You are never told whether staying put would be a triumph or a surrender, and the poem's honesty lies in leaving that open. Anyone who has faced a choice that meant closing doors will recognise the hesitation in "will I be wholly prepared."