A harbor is supposed to be the one thing that doesn't move. Ships wander off, storms come and go, and the harbor waits. Under that title sits a single word, "Stay," and the poem quickly sets up a tension. The speaker calls the beloved "the fixed point on which my world revolves," yet a few lines later that same person is "drifting away." The fixed point turns out not to be fixed at all, and the whole poem lives in that gap.
On the surface, it is about loving someone who gives only intermittent presence. The speaker admits to a pattern: "No Matter how many heartbreaks and unrequited love, / I always wonder back to you." The poem doesn't say whether those heartbreaks came from this person or from others, and the vagueness helps. Whatever happened elsewhere, this is where the speaker returns. The meetings are real and good "for a time," and during them the speaker forgets "that it's temporary." The final lines take that forgetting apart. What felt like love was "just a jump start for another three hundred and sixty five days without." The central idea is that hope renewed by small gifts becomes a cycle, and the cycle hurts more than the absence itself.
The imagery is unusual in how unromantic it becomes. The opening borrows from astronomy, with a "fixed point" and a world that "revolves," which suggests gravity and a pull the speaker did not choose. Then comes "It is weird," a casual, almost embarrassed phrase that deflates the grand picture and makes the speaker sound like someone puzzling aloud. By the end the vocabulary is mechanical. A "jump start" is what you give a dead battery. It gets the engine running but supplies no fuel. Spelling out "three hundred and sixty five days" turns the waiting into arithmetic, and judging by that number, the reunions may be roughly yearly, though the poem never says so.
The poem is free verse, with no regular metre and no steady rhyme, but the line lengths do a lot of work. The first line is long and spills over, as if the speaker can't contain the thought. Then the lines contract into a chant: "For a time you aren't drifting away, / For a time you're choosing me." Each "for a time" shifts slightly. The first is a feeling ("it's good"), the second is defined by an absence ("aren't drifting"), and the third makes the boldest claim in the shortest line. The phrase works like a mantra, but it also announces its own limit, like someone counting out a small supply. In the second stanza, "This love of ours." is the shortest line in the poem, and its full stop closes the door. The last line is the longest, running on with barely a pause, so that the sentence drags the way the days do.
A few words carry the emotional weight. "Choose" appears twice, first in the brief gift of "you're choosing me," then in the permanent withholding of "never choose to stay." "Stay" is both the title word and the last word, and it rhymes with "away," the poem's most audible chime, across the stanza break. Those two words are the poem's poles, and the rhyme ties them together. Then there is "wonder back." It probably means "wander," but the slip is revealing. The word returns in the last line as "wondering why," so the wandering body and the wondering mind are linked. Likewise, "without" hangs at the end of its phrase and never says without what. The missing object is the person.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. The speaker never accuses, never rages, and never pretends to have moved on. The tone is flat, almost tired, and that is what makes it believable. The poem ends on a question that stays unanswered, which suits its subject. It also shows how plain language and line length can carry feeling. A single title word can act as a plea, and a repeated phrase can reveal both hope and its limit. Many readers will recognise the situation: wanting someone to be a harbor and knowing that, for now, they are only a place to pass through.