The title promises astronomy and delivers a beach. "Celestial bodies" sounds like a textbook phrase for stars, planets and moons, but in Dave Bonta's poem the bodies are the ones lying around in the heat: "so many bodies at the sea." The joke is quiet and keeps unfolding. By the last line these human bodies have been lifted into the sky and demoted again, now "cheap moons."
The first couplet looks at the crowd with a cool, almost zoological eye. "Creatures of sweat" strips people of names, jobs and faces, leaving damp, warm flesh. "So many" carries a faint weariness, as though the speaker is counting rather than admiring. Then the poem swings to "chairs toward / that dog the sun," and the line break does real work. The line ends on "toward," so the sentence leans the way the chairs do. There is no verb, so nobody is seen turning; the whole crowd is simply already angled the same way. Calling the sun "that dog" is the poem's boldest move. It has the offhand tone of someone pointing out a neighbour's animal. A dog is a thing people gather around, and the phrase "dog days" for the hottest stretch of summer is hard not to hear behind it. The sun, normally the most powerful object we know, is shrunk to a pet that everyone has arranged their furniture around.
The third couplet is the only place a person speaks: "where a ship made me / understand many things." It arrives abruptly, and its grammar is slippery. Where is "where"? Presumably out at sea, in the direction the chairs face, but the word also hints at the place where the speaker sits. What the ship teaches is left as "many things," a deliberately vague phrase that shrugs at the idea of an epiphany. The poem gives us the feeling of having understood without handing over the lesson. Judging by the contrast, a ship is something that goes somewhere, while the bodies stay put, but the poem never says so. That open space is part of its charm.
The final couplet closes the circle. "Eyes full of it all" can mean eyes crammed with sea, sun, ship and flesh, a glut of looking. It also quietly produces a pun: eyes that are *full*, like full moons. Moons make no light of their own; they only return what the sun gives them. So the crowd, turned toward its sun-dog, shines back borrowed light. "Cheap" adds a sting. These moons are tawdry and mass-produced, nothing like the real ones. The poem doesn't explain what makes them cheap, which lets the word hover between mockery and a rueful self-recognition, since the speaker's eyes are presumably just as full.
The construction is plain and tidy. There are four couplets, no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, so the poem drifts forward like a thought rather than a statement. The lines are short, around five to seven syllables, and sit close to speech rhythm rather than regular metre. Sound does some of the work that rhyme usually would. S-sounds run through the poem, in "so," "sea," "sweat," "sun," "ship," and "things," a soft hiss that suits surf and sunscreen. The figures also form a pattern. A simile opens the poem ("like creatures of sweat"), a bare metaphor sits in the middle (the sun *is* a dog), and a second simile closes it ("like cheap moons"). Both similes shrink their subjects, from people to creatures and from moons to cheap ones, so the poem is quietly deflating as it goes.
What makes it worth reading is how much it does in eight lines. It builds a small solar system out of a crowded beach, with a dog-sun, reflecting moons and a ship passing through, and it never lectures. The tone is amused rather than scornful, and the speaker is implicated rather than superior. Anyone who has watched strangers arrange themselves around the heat will recognise the picture, and the poem makes the ordinary ritual look briefly cosmic and a little absurd.