Nine words are all Dave Bonta needs to put an expanse of water and a human face into the same frame. "Harbor" is built from two images, morning ships and a wife's nose, and the poem never says why they belong together. It trusts the reader to work that out, and the working-out is where its pleasure lies.
The title does a great deal of quiet work. Without it, the poem might read as a random shift of attention, a man glancing from the view to his spouse. With it, the nose can become a ship's prow, a small promontory catching the first light, and the face beside the speaker becomes the place where he comes to rest. That is an inference rather than something stated, but the poem seems built to invite it. The central idea is that a harbor need not be a place. It can be a person, and what makes someone a harbor is the steady, ordinary attention we give them.
The syntax is where the poem is most clever. "I take notice of" sits in the middle line and works in two directions. Read from the top, we get "morning ships I take notice of": the ships are what he sees. Read toward the bottom, we get "I take notice of my wife's nose": the sentence turns and lands somewhere unexpected. Because the poem has no punctuation, the middle line can belong to both halves, and the reader's eye pivots on it just as the speaker's attention does, swinging from the wide horizon to the face close beside him. The phrase "take notice of" is also a little formal, almost like a harbor master entering arrivals in a log. Applying that official language to a nose is gently funny.
The rhythm is compact and balanced. Counting syllables gives three, five, three, so the poem swells in the middle and narrows again, a shape that mirrors the widening and narrowing of the speaker's gaze. There is no rhyme and there are no capital letters or full stops, so the poem seems to drift in and out of the reader's attention rather than announce itself. The sound has its own subtle design, though. Nasal consonants run through it: "morning," "notice," "my," "nose." Few body parts are as well named by their own sounds as the nose, and the poem hums quietly through it before arriving at the word. "Nose" is also a single, blunt syllable, so the poem ends with a small bump, the way a boat touches a dock.
The choice of the nose matters just as much. A love poem might reach for eyes or lips, but the nose is the unglamorous feature, the one we rarely praise. Choosing it is both comic and tender, because it suggests a closeness that no longer needs flattery. The line says "my wife's," not a name or an adjective. There is no "beautiful" or "lovely." The possessive is domestic and plain, and the poem leaves out the praise and keeps only the looking. Whatever love is here appears as attention, not as description. If we picture the scene (judging by the word "morning," it may be an early hour with the light just arriving), the nose is exactly what one would notice beside a sleeper: a small, familiar landmark in a face that has become home.
The poem's significance lies in how much it does with so little. It shifts scale in three short lines, from the vastness of ships and water to the intimacy of a single feature, and it does so without any explanation. It shows how a very short poem can work by juxtaposition: two images set side by side so that the space between them fills with meaning. It also quietly overturns the usual hierarchy of what deserves notice. The ships are impressive, yet the poem gives the final, weightiest position to the nose, as if the true arrival of the morning were not the ships but the person beside him.
For a student reader, "Harbor" is a good reminder that a poem does not need many words to say something large. Here the large thing is that to notice someone, truly and without needing to praise them, may be the oldest way of offering shelter.