Eighteen words, one sentence, no punctuation: Dave Bonta's "Marshlands" is small enough to memorise and strange enough to keep reopening. A speaker says he found solid ground in an unlikely place, behind the sea, at a moment of intimate contact, while something is being hunted. The poem seems to be about the marsh as a place where elements refuse to stay in their lanes, and about how ground is found at the edges, in motion, in pursuit of something that can't be held.
The title does a great deal of the work. A marsh is neither land nor water, so the first line, "I found the ground there," carries a faint relief. "Found" suggests the speaker expected not to find it. "The ground" is also oddly definite, as if it were the only ground there is. Then comes "in back of the sea," a colloquial phrase, the kind you'd use for a shed behind a house. It gives the sea a back, as though it were an animal or a building with a hidden side, and it makes the marsh the sea's backyard, the part we don't usually see.
The third line is the hinge. "Mouth to mouth" has no punctuation to tell us which neighbour it belongs to, so it attaches upward to the ground and sea, or downward to the hunting. It also holds at least three meanings at once. A river's mouth meeting the sea is exactly what makes a marsh. Two mouths pressed together is a kiss. Mouth-to-mouth is also the breath you give to revive someone. Each reading adds something: the sea and land as lovers, or as rescuer and rescued, or simply as a meeting of water and water. The poem doesn't choose.
Sound ties the lines together where rhyme doesn't. The line endings (there, sea, mouth, fire) don't rhyme, but the vowel of "found" and "ground" comes back in "mouth," twice, like a tide returning. Then "mouth" gives way to "moth," a word one letter shorter. Take the "u" out of one and you have the other, so the hunting line seems to close its own jaws on its prey. A reader may feel the mouths swallowing the moth before the grammar says so.
That grammar is deliberately loose. "Hunting a moth of fire" doesn't say who is hunting. It could be the speaker, the ground, the sea, or the pair of joined mouths. The "moth of fire" is the poem's boldest image. Judging by the marsh setting, it may suggest the pale lights that travellers have long reported over wetlands, though that is an inference and the poem never names them. It could equally be a spark or a flame with wings. Moths are drawn to fire, so a moth made of fire is something that pursues light while being light, and the hunter is chasing a thing that is itself on a chase. Fire in a place made of water and mud is also a clash of elements. The poem sets earth, sea and flame against each other, and the moth adds air in its wings.
The form is as spare as the image. Apart from "I," nothing is capitalised, and nothing is punctuated, so the poem never gets a full stop. The first two lines run five syllables each, steady and calm. The third shrinks to a three-syllable pivot, "mouth to mouth," with a beat on each word. The last line stretches out, its rhythm skipping forward like a lunge. The tense shifts too, from the settled past of "found" to the ongoing "hunting." The speaker has arrived somewhere, but the poem ends mid-chase, with nothing caught.
That is where its interest lies. In a few words it suggests that firm footing isn't something you find by standing still. In this marsh, ground is discovered at the meeting of mouths, in the middle of a pursuit. The poem doesn't explain what the fire is or who is hunting, and that openness invites the reader to step onto the same uncertain surface and decide whether it will hold.