A holiday usually comes with a list: check-out times, booked tables, sights worth seeing. Dave Bonta's six-line poem opens with that kind of administrative furniture, "I have instructions", and then lets the sea wash most of it away.
The first stanza turns on a small hinge. "I have instructions / but nothing without the sea" can be read several ways. The speaker may have instructions but nothing else, since nothing counts without the sea. The instructions may amount to nothing unless the sea is there. The word "without" may even carry its old sense of "outside", so that nothing exists beyond the sea. The poem never chooses between these, and the uncertainty suits a speaker who is loosening his grip on plans. The line break helps. "I have instructions" is a complete, confident statement until "but" undercuts it.
In the second stanza the sea becomes a person: "my full gaze upon / her conversation". The line ends on "upon", leaving the gaze hanging in mid-air, exactly where the speaker's attention is. What he looks at is a conversation, which is an odd thing to see. The phrase mixes the senses, since the sea's talk is something heard, yet here it is watched. It also implies that the sea is talking to someone, perhaps to the shore, perhaps to the sky. The speaker is not a participant. He is a listener, almost an eavesdropper, and "full" suggests that listening takes everything he has. If the poem has a holiday wish, it is to give attention, not to follow a schedule.
The last stanza brings back the opening word, "instructions", now softened: "as general / as the rain". "General" is doing double work. It means vague, but rain is also general in the sense of falling on everyone and everything alike. Rain is also the classic enemy of holiday plans, so comparing the instructions to it hints that they behave like weather, something that comes down over you rather than something you carry out. That is my reading, but the simile supports it. The final line, "as the rain", is only three syllables long, the shortest in the poem, so the poem thins out and stops, like a shower easing off.
The poem's form is plain. It has three couplets, no rhyme and no regular meter, and its line lengths wander from five syllables to seven to three. The punctuation is also absent, which keeps the syntax loose enough for the ambiguity in the first stanza. The sound is quiet but deliberate. "Gaze" and "rain" share a long vowel and sit at the ends of their stanzas' key phrases. "Instructions" and "conversation" are the poem's two longest, most Latinate words, and they echo each other's "-tion" ending while meaning opposite things. An instruction travels one way, from a giver to a receiver, and a conversation is an exchange. The speaker has the first and is gazing at the second. Around those two words, most of the vocabulary is short and plain: "sea", "rain", "gaze", "full".
The title adds one more formal word. A "desideratum" is something wanted or felt to be missing, and the singular form suggests one thing in particular. The poem never names it outright. Judging by the imagery, the desired thing seems to be the sea's company and the freedom to look at it without being told what to do. The stiff Latin of the title, set against such a relaxed poem, is gently comic, like a formal request for permission to do nothing.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It does not say that plans are tiresome or that nature is better than rules. It enacts the shift, moving from "I have" to a gaze and then to a simile in which the rules are no firmer than rain. It also practises what it describes: its own instructions to the reader, if it has any, are as general as the rain, and the reader has to do the looking.