Retreat is usually a word for losing. Armies retreat, and so do arguments. Dave Bonta's "On retreat" steers the word somewhere gentler, then snaps its military meaning back into view in the final line with a flag. The poem is only about forty words long, but it holds two ways of getting through a hard stretch and quietly judges between them.
The first line sets the terms: "having room enough to retreat." Retreating here is something you need space for, almost a luxury. The speaker's wife uses that space to find "a new now," a phrase that makes the present sound like something you can discover, as if she has stepped into a different room of the same moment. The speaker's reaction is a short, flat confession: "and I know nothing." The sounds help. "New now" is answered by "know nothing," and the repeated n turns the two phrases into a faint echo. Her discovery and his ignorance sit in the same sound-space, but they do not meet.
The middle stanza is the speaker's own, and it is noticeably busier. He inks "my book of dark weather," and that verb is physical and messy, a word for staining a page. "Dark weather" is a good metaphor for a mood. Weather arrives without being asked, cannot be argued with, and can only be recorded. Then comes "do my mad dance." The plain verb "do" sounds almost embarrassed, as if the dance were a habit he can't excuse. Look at the repeated "my" (my book, my mad dance). He owns these routines, and he may be a little wary of them. One is a performance on paper and the other is a performance with the body, and both are loud ways of coping.
Form reinforces this. The poem has no punctuation, no capital letters and no rhyme, so it reads like a thought that never gets formally finished. The stanzas run three lines, two lines, three lines, which means the speaker's frantic activity is squeezed between two stanzas about his wife. She opens the poem and she closes it, and he is literally hemmed in by her calm. The only hinges are small words: "as" makes his scribbling and dancing happen at the same time as his not-knowing, and "but" turns the poem toward her.
The last stanza rewards slow reading. "She does the best / most natural way" is deliberately slippery. Because of the line break, "does the best" first sounds like the familiar idiom "does her best," and then the sentence swerves into "most natural way." Effort and ease blur together, which suits a person whose method is not showy. Then comes "keeps time," which works two ways. It can mean keeping a musical beat, which quietly answers the "mad dance," since a dancer who keeps time is the opposite of one who flails. It can also mean simply attending to time as it passes, which links back to the "new now" of the first stanza. Against this stands "some rash flag." "Some" is dismissive, and "rash" means hasty. A flag is a signal, a banner or a surrender, so it is an emblem that announces your state to everyone. The line ends on two stressed words, "rash flag," and the abruptness sounds like the thing it is rejecting.
The poem's central idea, then, is that steadiness can be wiser than display. The speaker's dark weather, mad dance and flag-waving are ways of declaring distress, while his wife's way is simply to stay inside time and keep its beat.
There is also a nice irony, though it is an inference from the text rather than something the poem says. The speaker claims to know nothing and calls his own methods rash, yet the poem we are reading is arguably the inked "book of dark weather," or a page of it. He sees clearly enough to describe the difference and to admit which side he stands on. The admiration he expresses for her calm is carried by the very activity he seems to belittle. Part of the poem's significance lies in this humility, since it manages to be funny about its speaker, tender toward his wife, and exact about two temperaments in under fifty words. A retreat, it suggests, does not have to be a defeat. It can be a way of finding a new now, even if someone else has to find it first.