"Oyster out of water" is a small joke on the old phrase "fish out of water," and Dave Bonta's "Low tide" gets a surprising amount out of the swap. A stranded fish flaps and gasps. An oyster can only stay shut and wait for the sea to come back. So the poem opens on a creature that is exposed, slow and stuck, and the next line hands that condition to the speaker: "I poke all about." The verb "poke" suggests someone prodding at the edges of a situation they can't get out of, or a shucking knife working at a shell.
The central idea seems to be a doubled landscape. On one level we are on a mudflat where the water has pulled back and left everything bare. On another we seem to be in a bedroom at night. The last word, "bed," joins the two, since it is where people sleep but also what oyster colonies on the sea floor are called. The poem never names insomnia, but "rest-vexed" points that way, and the phrase invites a reading in which the tide of sleep has gone out and left the sleeper stranded. The poem keeps both scenes in play and doesn't choose between them.
The construction is spare. There are three couplets, no capitals, no punctuation, and lines of only three to six syllables. Without full stops, nothing is closed off, so the thoughts drift into one another the way a sleepless mind wanders. There is no end rhyme, but the sound-patterning is dense. The first couplet is full of round, open vowels: "oyster," "out," "all," "about," "poke." The second couplet turns to liquid l-sounds and a near-chime: "low way to lay / little thief." "Way" and "lay" almost rhyme, and "low" echoes them, so the lines slosh and slacken like shallow water. The final couplet clogs the sound up. "Rest-vexed bed" is a pile of clipped consonants (st, x, d) that stops the poem on a flat, heavy monosyllable. The movement from liquid to hard mirrors the tide going out and leaving a firm, unyielding bed.
The wordplay is where the poem is most inventive. "A low way to lay" slips between "lay" and "lie." Strictly, we lie down and lay something else down, and the poem's grammar seems to sidestep the rule while enjoying the double meaning of laying oneself down or laying something down. "Low" works on several levels too. It is the tide, the flat posture of someone lying awake, and a mood, as in low spirits. There is self-mockery here as well. The speaker admits that this is not a dignified way to be, and the admission makes the poem more human and a little funny.
"Little thief" is the most open phrase. It addresses no one in particular. Judging by "rest-vexed," the thief might be whatever steals the speaker's sleep, whether worry, a racing mind or the night itself. It might equally be the oyster, a small, shut-up creature who has taken something, or the speaker's own self, addressed with a rueful tenderness. The poem doesn't settle it, and the ambiguity lets the reader choose who is guilty.
The last couplet, "together with / the rest-vexed bed," doesn't finish its sentence. "Together with" promises a list or a partnership and delivers only the bed. The speaker, the oyster and the thief all end up lumped together on one surface, and the poem leaves them there. "The rest" can also be read as "the remainder," which gives the line a shadow of leftover things stranded when the water drops. That is a possible reading rather than a certain one, but the compound "rest-vexed" is built to hold both senses.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it uses to get this far. In about twenty words it twists an idiom, sets up a double setting and plays on sound, and it neither explains itself nor points to a moral. Its mood sits between comic and uncomfortable, which suits the experience it circles, the lonely absurdity of lying awake and feeling like something left on the shore. A reader finishes it with questions rather than answers, and that suits a poem about waiting for something to return.