Joy usually gets praised in poems, but in Dave Bonta's "Errant" it arrives with a suspicious edge. The poem begins by trying to catch joy in two images, "a fast fire" and "an ocean," and ends with the speaker tallying his "profits" in a "war against / this green old heart." Between those points, the poem argues with itself about whether words can hold what it has just described. Its central idea is that intense happiness is fleeting and without foundation, and that writing about it may leave you with only what is left after the burning.
The opening comparisons work by contrast. A fire is consuming and a wren is tiny, so "a fast fire of joy / like a wren" suggests something small, bright, restless, and gone before you can look at it properly. Then the scale changes. Joy becomes "an ocean," vast and without edges, but the poem pins two odd adjectives to it on separate lines: "mortal" and "groundless." Joy that can die is an unexpected idea, and "groundless" has two meanings. The ocean has no bottom to stand on, and the joy may have no reason behind it. Each word gets its own line, so the reader is made to pause on it.
The title matters here. "Errant" means wandering, as in a knight-errant, but it also hints at straying and mistake. The poem plays on both senses in its strangest question: "which world is in error / and when can I have it." The speaker doesn't ask for the correct world. The wish is for the one that is wrong, or wandering, and the question is both funny and a little desperate. The pronoun "it" is vague enough that the line seems to want the mistaken world as much as it questions it. Later, the "accidental sail" repeats the idea. This is a boat with no destination, which suits the ocean from earlier, and the speaker seems half tempted to give up the "business of words" and simply drift.
That phrase, "the business of words," is the poem's most pointed piece of vocabulary. Calling writing a business sets up the final stanza's financial language, "I consider my profits." The poem keeps drawing on trade and warfare, two ways of measuring gain and loss, and applies them to joy and language. The result sounds close to self-mockery. The speaker keeps accounts on something that was never meant to be profitable.
The most haunting stanzas come in the middle. "Ash is the only fruit / that would endure" turns the fire from the opening into its aftermath. The "would" matters: this is a conditional, a statement about what could last, not what does. Fruit suggests growth and sweetness, but the only crop the poem will allow is burnt residue. Then comes a simile that is easy to misread: "like an old loving servant / of a match." Ash seems to be the faithful servant, staying behind after the flame has used itself up. The image is tender and rather sad, since ash is loyal precisely because it is what remains.
Structurally, the poem is made of short stanzas of two or three lines, with no rhyme, no punctuation, and no capital letters. The missing question mark after "when can I have it" and "shall I turn away" lets the questions drift like thoughts rather than demands. The rhythm is uneven, with lines of only a few syllables, and that slows the reading. Sound still holds things together in quieter ways: "fast fire" shares an opening consonant, "world" and "words" echo each other, and the two "like" similes, the wren and the servant, bracket the middle of the poem.
The last image holds the poem's tension. "Green old heart" is an oxymoron, since green suggests youth and newness while old suggests wear, and the heart is both. The speaker wages "war against" it, as if his own capacity for joy were an enemy to be managed. The poem doesn't say who wins, and I think that is why it lingers. It lets joy, doubt, and a loyal distrust of language all stay in the room, and it never pretends that words can settle the matter.