Six short lines, no capital letters, no punctuation, and a word as old-fashioned as "whither": Dave Bonta's "Vessel" looks like a question jotted on a scrap of paper. "whither the body / which I am now" has no verb to finish it, so the reader has to supply one: where is the body going? Where does it end up? The phrasing is odd in a useful way. We expect "the body which I have," but the speaker says "which I am." The body isn't a possession or a coat to be taken off. It is the self. The little word "now" admits that this arrangement is temporary, and that unsettles the whole poem.
The second couplet answers with places rather than explanations. "the coffee-house of passion" is a lively picture: a room full of talk, heat, stimulation, people drinking something that keeps them wired. "Passion" probably means desire here, but it also carries its older sense of suffering, so the body is both a place of appetite and a place of ache. Then, with no connecting word, comes "the stairs down to nothing." The two images are set side by side like doors in a corridor. One room is crowded and the other is a drop. The sounds mark the contrast. "coffee-house of passion" is soft and quick, full of f and s sounds, while "stairs down to nothing" is slow, with heavy stresses that seem to take one step at a time. There is also a quiet echo across the stanzas: "now" in the second line and "down" in the fourth. It isn't rhyme, but it connects the present moment to the descent.
The last couplet makes the sharpest turn. "the head and meat" splits a person into mind and flesh, but "meat" is a blunt, almost butcher's word, and it flattens the body into something to be sold or cooked. Notice also that the possessives have drained away. The poem begins with "I am" and ends with "the head and meat," as though the speaker has stepped back and is looking at the body from outside. Then comes the poem's only simile, and its longest line: "like a silver pen to carry ink in." After all that heat and falling, the comparison is cool, precious and made by hand. The pen is itself a small vessel, which echoes the title. A vessel also invites a question about what it holds. The poem never says what the ink is. Judging by the imagery, it could be thought, blood, language, or the life that the body holds only until it is used up. A pen carries ink so that the ink can be spent. The line also ends on "in," a small enclosing word that leaves the poem hanging on the idea of containment.
Structurally, the poem is three couplets, each doing a different job: a question, two possible answers, and a comparison. Almost nothing happens in the grammar, since the only verbs are "am" and the infinitive "to carry." The poem is made of nouns, like a guided tour of exhibits. It has no rhyme and no regular meter, and its music comes from line breaks and sound echoes. The lines grow longer as the poem goes on, and the pace slows to match the pen's slender shape.
The poem is significant for how much it does in so little space, and for how it handles a large subject, mortality, without a consoling sermon. The staircase to "nothing" stays in the poem and is not talked away. But the question "whither the body" gets one more answer, a use rather than a destination. If we read the ink as writing, which is an inference but a tempting one, then the body goes into what it makes, and the poem we are reading is the ink. That reading is never confirmed. What the poem offers instead is three ways of seeing the same body: as a place for company, as a drop into emptiness, and as a good tool in the hand of something else. A reader is left to decide which one, if any, is the truest.