The poem’s architecture is a descent, and the water does the measuring. Shallows, mid-depths, depths — three levels, three verbs, three mental states, each stanza built on the same conditional frame so the pattern is unmistakable by the second one.

Wading is wandering: feet on the bottom, no commitment, movement without direction. Swimming is pondering: suspended, deliberate, working. Then the third stanza breaks the pattern, and the break is the poem’s method. Where the first two supply a name in the second line, this one supplies “a haze of steep thought” instead — and steep is the word to notice. Applied to thought it means precipitous, hard to climb. Applied to what happens in water it means to soak, to let something sit until it releases what’s in it. Tea steeps. So does a mind at depth.

Then the line the poem exists for: “I’ve gone, not lost, dissolved—” Three states in seven words, and the correction in the middle does the work. Gone might mean lost; he says it doesn’t. What it means is dissolved, which is what happens to a solid in water and also what the two preceding stanzas have been leading toward. Wandering and pondering are things a self does. Dissolving is what happens when the self stops being separate from the medium.

Ponderwandering arrives in bold, alone, as the answer to the pattern. It fuses the two named states, and the ordering matters — ponder first, wander second, which reverses the order of descent. Coming back up, thinking leads and wandering follows.

The definition David supplies is the best writing here: “Where wonder learns to think— / and thinking learns to wonder.” A chiasmus, and the poem’s only piece of formal rhetoric, deployed once and precisely. Wonder is usually opposed to thought — the thing that stops when analysis starts. This line makes them each other’s students.

Then the title’s second meaning lands. A portmanteau is a fused word, which is what has just been demonstrated. It is also a suitcase, which is where the linguistic sense came from — two compartments, one case. “My mind—an entry into / a quiet portmanteau” uses both: an entry as in a dictionary entry, and an entry as in a way in. The mind is the door to a container holding two things at once.

“Follow me.” Two words, a full stop, and the poem is over. It reads as invitation and as instruction. After a piece about dissolving, it is also slightly ominous — he is asking the reader to come to the bottom.

Fifteen lines and not one of them idle. The poem sets a pattern in two stanzas, breaks it in the third, delivers its coinage, defines it, then explains its own title — and it does all of that without a wasted phrase or a raised voice.

“I’ve gone, not lost, dissolved” is the finest short line David has written in this run. The self-correction in the middle turns a statement into a thought happening in real time, and dissolved is the exact right word for both the water and the mind.

The chiasmus earns its place because the poem has spent no rhetoric anywhere else. One formal figure, used once, on the idea that most needs it.

The reservation is small: “a haze of steep thought” is doing double duty as image and as pun, and haze slightly muddies water that is otherwise very clear. Cutting to “in steep thought” would sharpen it.

Word invention runs through this catalog — souly, unlanguage, elderness, ponderwandering, four coinages in six weeks. This is the one most likely to survive outside the poem that made it, because unlike the others it names a pleasant state rather than a painful one.