Someone walks down to the water holding a thesaurus the way you would hold a small child, close to the body and a little awkwardly. The picture is both funny and tender, and Dave Bonta's "Port" depends on that mix. In six unpunctuated lines, the speaker carries a book of alternative words to a harbour where the boats seem to be doing all the talking. What comes back is "a bland discourse / in three dozen tongues." The central idea is a quiet deflation. A person who trusts in words, and in always having another one to hand, arrives at a place with more voices than any book could sort, and finds them oddly empty.
The simile of the "child in arms" rewards a second look. A thesaurus is a book of near-equivalents, built on the belief that a better word is always available. To cradle it like a child suggests more than affection. It suggests dependence, as if the speaker's faith in vocabulary is something that must be protected and carried everywhere. The sea, by contrast, is simply there, and it needs no reference book.
The second couplet turns the harbour into a crowd. Boats "confess together," and confession is normally the most private kind of speech, one voice and one listener. Here it is collective and simultaneous, so nothing can be made out. The speaker never describes the actual sounds, but the verb invites us to supply them: hulls knocking, rigging clinking, each vessel muttering its own secrets over the others. Then comes "and fall out." Because the line ends there, the phrase first reads as "quarrel," so the boats confess and then argue. The next line changes the grammar, and "fall out" becomes something the boats let drop: "a bland discourse." One small line break lets the confession end in a squabble and in spilled chatter at once.
The poem has no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters except the pronoun "I," so it runs as a single breath. The lines swell and then collapse. The first is six syllables, the second and third about eight each, and then the poem drops to the three syllables of "and fall out," as though the boats' talk really does tumble. The last two lines ("a bland discourse / in three dozen tongues") settle into a flat, weary rhythm that suits the word "bland."
That word choice is the poem's sharpest joke. "Discourse" is a stiff, bookish term, the sort a person might find under "talk" in a thesaurus, so the speaker's own language gives away the habit the poem is gently mocking. "Three dozen" is a similar trick. It sounds precise, but nobody could count the tongues of a harbour, and "dozen" belongs to eggs and bread rolls, which shrinks the grandeur of the scene. The final word, "tongues," carries more than one echo. It can mean languages, and it may also recall Babel or speaking in tongues, though the poem leaves any such link for the reader to make. By ending on it, the poem finishes on the very thing the thesaurus claims to master and the sea refuses to be mastered by.
The title adds one more layer. A port is where ships shelter, but in English the word also covers carrying and, in computing, adapting something to work in a new place. That second sense is my reading, not something the poem states. It fits, though, because the speaker is carrying words across to a place and listening to a crowd of languages being passed between boats.
What makes "Port" worth reading is how much it does in so little space. It takes the old expectation that the sea will speak profoundly to a poet and answers it with dry humour. Having many words, the poem suggests, is not the same as having something to say, and the boats, with all their tongues, prove it. The speaker is not exactly defeated, since the thesaurus is still held tenderly at the end. But the book now looks like a small comfort, and the harbour keeps talking without meaning anything.