The title borrows a famous phrase and then changes its mood. "World enough, and time" comes from Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," where the speaker imagines what he and his beloved could do if they had both. Dave Bonta keeps the phrase but drops the conditional, and what follows is less a seduction than a strange private proposal. The speaker asks whether he should marry the world itself. The poem is about loneliness, desire and time, and its central idea is that the body in love can become a world large enough to fill the emptiness the clock keeps measuring.
The opening couplet sets that emptiness out in two odd comparisons: "I am alone as the clock / or an orange in translation." A clock ticks away without anyone needing it to. An orange "in translation" is harder to pin down. Perhaps the fruit, its colour and its name slip when carried into another language, so that something whole and bright loses part of itself on the way. Judging by the imagery, the speaker feels solitary in this way: complete in himself, yet impossible to pass across to anyone else.
The orange then rolls into the next image, a "little sun," and the mood sours. "Mean" can mean stingy or small or unkind, and a mean little sun is one that hoards its warmth. The speaker is also "blue at the difficulty of love." Blue is the opposite of orange on the colour wheel, so the couplet sets warm against cold and brightness against sadness within a single breath.
At the third couplet the poem turns. "Do I take this world to be my wife" echoes the question asked in a wedding ceremony, but there is no question mark, and the speaker puts the question to the world rather than to a person. The world appears "today in her flower suit," which is playful and a little absurd. The picture is of spring in blossom, dressed for the occasion. "Suit" also carries the old sense of courtship, as in pressing one's suit, so the phrase covers both the bride's clothes and the lover's pursuit. The word "today" matters too. A wedding is fixed to a date, and the clock from the first line has not gone away.
The form is as stripped down as the feeling. There are five unrhymed couplets, with no capital letters and no punctuation, and each line is only six to eight syllables long. Without full stops, the images slide into one another, and the line breaks do the work of pauses. "A body in love is so much" stops just short of its payoff, and then "well-oiled uncertainty" arrives. The phrase is a paradox. "Well-oiled" suggests machinery, perhaps the clock again, running smoothly, and perhaps also a looser, tipsy ease. "Uncertainty" says that nothing about the machine is sure. Love here runs smoothly without any guarantee.
The last couplet draws the mechanical and the natural together. "Secret motions" could describe clock hands turning or tides moving, and the body "calling up / a sea of my own" shows the lover as a source of water. The sound of the ending matters as well. The poem begins with "alone" and ends with "own," two words that nearly echo each other, so that isolation turns into possession. The speaker has not found a partner in any ordinary sense. He has found, inside love, a whole sea belonging to him, which is a kind of "world enough."
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in ten short lines. It answers a centuries-old love poem with a quieter argument. Marvell's speaker is anxious about time running out, while Bonta's takes time as a given and looks for room instead. It also refuses to make love sound simple, since the feeling it describes is blue, difficult and uncertain, yet still large enough to call up a sea. Its logic is private and slightly strange, and it asks the reader to follow the images rather than a plot. If you follow them, the movement from clock to orange to sun to bride to sea has its own clear sense, and the poem leaves you with the surprise of that last, unpunctuated image.