Six short lines, and the poem still manages to contain a definition, a confession and a small voyage. It opens with a claim that sounds like a dictionary entry gone strange: "Desire is a mind / with two ships in it." Dave Bonta doesn't describe a feeling. He builds a place for it. Desire becomes a mind, and the mind becomes a stretch of water crowded with vessels that cannot sail in the same direction. The title, "Divided loyalties," tells us what the ships mean. Wanting something is easy, but wanting two incompatible things at once is where trouble starts.
The image is clever because it is so spare. We are not told what the ships carry or where they are headed, and the poem never names the second pull. Judging by the title, the two ships stand for two claims on the speaker, perhaps two people, or perhaps a person and an escape. The vagueness is deliberate. A ship suggests departure, distance and the chance of leaving, so even before anyone acts, the mind has already been somewhere else.
Then the poem shifts from metaphor to narrative, and the grammar changes with it. "I stayed with her / and walked—" is the only moment of plain action, and it contradicts itself. To stay is to be still, and to walk is to move. The dash after "walked" hangs the line over a gap, as if the speaker pauses mid-step. We can read that gap as hesitation, as a decision still being made, or as the point where the other ship briefly comes into view. The poem doesn't say which, and that openness is part of its pleasure.
The last three lines hold the poem's most interesting wordplay. "Staying in a fable" repeats the verb "stayed" from two lines earlier, but now staying is no longer simple loyalty. A fable is a story with a lesson, and it is also something made up. To stay *in* one suggests the speaker has chosen a narrative over reality, or is telling himself a tale about faithfulness. It could be an enchanted refuge or a comfortable lie. The poem's tone leaves both readings available, and I suspect the wry, slightly rueful sound of the line is the best clue that it is not simply happy.
Then comes "bound for bed," and the nautical image returns, folded into ordinary speech. "Bound for" is how we describe a ship's destination, so the bed becomes a port, and the earlier ships quietly come back as the poem's closing metaphor. But "bound" also means tied or restrained, and the pun reaches back to loyalty. The speaker is both heading somewhere and held in place. This is where the title's "divided loyalties" resolves into one word: he is travelling and tethered at once.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. Its lines run from about three to six syllables, so the rhythm feels like quiet speech overheard. Some sound patterns still hold it together. The short *i* sounds in "ships," "with" and "it" make the second line clipped and busy, as if the ships were jostling. The soft *s* of "ships," "stayed," "staying" and "she" (echoed in "her") gives the middle lines a hush. The repetition of "stayed" and "staying" works like an anchor chain, pulling the reader back to the same spot even as the poem moves forward.
What makes the poem worth reading is its compression and its refusal to settle. It starts as an aphorism, the kind of line you might underline, and turns into a tiny story that quietly complicates the aphorism. We expect the metaphor to explain the speaker's situation. Instead the situation makes the metaphor stranger, and by the end the ships are as much about the speaker's self-deception as about desire. A poem this short can't resolve a conflict of loyalties, but it can show how one feels from the inside: a crowded harbor, a step taken and not taken, and a story the speaker tells to get himself to bed.