Twenty-eight words, four couplets, no rhyme: Dave Bonta's "Wake" is about as small as a poem can get while still holding a whole scene and a whole act of memory. On the surface it records something simple. A ship has gone, a girl sits alone on the dock, and the light fades. But the last two lines turn the poem back on itself. The speaker, who watched until it was too dark to see, is now writing, and cannot quite say what the writing is. The central idea seems to be that a poem can be the wake of an experience, what is left stirring in the water after the thing itself has moved on.
The title does a lot of work. "Wake" first means the trail a ship leaves behind, and the opening couplet, "After the ship / the wake," is built to mimic it. The line has no verb. It is a bare fragment, just a sequence: first the vessel, then its disturbance. The grammar itself arrives late and trails behind. A wake is also a vigil kept over someone, and "wake" is also what one does when one stays up through the night. The poem never says anyone has died, so these meanings stay in the background as echoes. Still, the girl who "sat alone" until nightfall looks like someone keeping watch, and the speaker, who stays to watch her, keeps a second, quieter one.
The sentence structure carries the poem's sense of time passing. After the fragment, everything from "At the dock" to "I now write" is a single sentence, running over three couplets with no punctuation to break it. The word "till" stretches the middle of it. It makes us feel the hours of sitting and the slow loss of light. Then the tense shifts without warning, from "sat" and "was" to the present of "I now write." In the grammar, the dark dock and the moment of writing are joined, as if the speaker never left it.
The ending is also pleasingly ambiguous. "I could not see / what it is that / I now write" can be read in two ways. On one reading, the darkness was so complete that the speaker couldn't see the girl, or the page. On another, "see" means understand: the speaker is writing something whose nature remains unclear to him. The phrase "what it is that" suggests this. It's a hesitant, groping construction, and the line break after "that," on a weak word with nothing to lean on, makes the reader's voice hang in the air the way the speaker's attention does. We are never told whether the thing being written is an elegy, a story, or a confession. The poem doesn't know either, and it admits as much.
Sound ties the poem together quietly. "Dock" and "dark" share their first and last consonants, so the girl's place and the oncoming night seem to belong to each other. The *w* of "wake" comes back in "was," "what," and finally "write," and the poem's last word is nearly an echo of its title. It is as if the wake has turned into the writing. The line lengths are short and uneven, with plain, mostly one-syllable words like "ship," "sat," "see" and "write." These keep the tone hushed and unforced, like someone speaking softly so as not to disturb what is left.
What makes "Wake" worth reading is how much it declines to explain. We don't learn who the girl is, whether she is waiting for the ship or has been left by it, or what the speaker's relation to her might be. Judging by the imagery, though, the gap is the point. Memory works like the wake: it is shaped by something departed, it fades into the surrounding water, and it can't be gripped. By ending with the act of writing in darkness, Bonta suggests that poems are made this way, by people who half-see, writing toward something they can only partly make out. The poem is small, but its final image of a writer working blind, in the dark, after the ship has gone, is one that lingers.