Few poems are as easy to quote and as hard to pin down as "tree is so hazy." It has four words, no punctuation, no capital letter, and a title made of three asterisks instead of a name. On the surface it reports a simple perception: someone looks at a tree and sees it softened, its edges lost. The cause might be mist, distance, dusk or tired eyes, and the poem never says which. That silence seems to be the point. The central idea is that seeing is never as sharp as the words we use for it. We say "tree" as though it were a clean, fixed object, and the very next word reports that the object won't hold still.
Look first at what is missing. The poem does not say "the tree" or "a tree." Without an article, "tree" stands bare, like a label or a note jotted down in the instant of looking, before anyone has tidied the sentence. It is not a particular tree we have been introduced to, and it is not trees in general. It hovers between the two, which is a kind of haziness in the grammar itself. The only verb is "is," the plainest in English, and it is in the present tense, so the haze seems to be happening now, while we read.
The sound of the line supports this. There are five syllables across four words, and the first three words are single beats, a short, flat stride. Then "hazy" stretches to two syllables and the line trails away. Two stresses carry it, TREE and HA-zy, with "is so" slack between them like a held breath. There is no rhyme in the usual sense, since there is no second line to rhyme with, but the vowel that opens the poem, the long "ee" of "tree," comes back at the end in "-zy." The line closes the way it began. Listen also to the consonants. The only hard, stopped sound is the "t" at the very start. After that the line runs on buzzing and hissing sounds ("is," "so," "hazy"), and the crisp edge of the first letter dissolves into the drift of the z. The sound of the line blurs along with its subject.
Then there is "so." It is an everyday, spoken word, the one in "it's so cold" or "that's so strange," and it makes the poem sound like a remark overheard rather than a composed statement. Is the speaker amazed or mildly frustrated? Both readings work, and nothing in the poem chooses between them. The word also has a quiet comedy. "So hazy" tries to measure something that can't be measured. How hazy is so hazy? The intensifier insists on precision just where precision is impossible.
The asterisks work in a similar way. They are normally used to mark a break or a gap, so as a title they suggest, though this is an inference, that the poem is a moment lifted out of something longer, or simply that no name was wanted. Either way, the reader gets no framing. No place, season or speaker is given, and the poem is itself a little hazy about where it comes from.
That is where its significance lies. It asks how much a poem actually needs, and it answers with almost nothing. It is built on an image, but the image is one that is failing, and the reader ends up as the one doing the seeing. Each of us pictures a different tree, in different weather, at a different distance, so the poem's vagueness is repeated in every mind that reads it.
You can see how carefully balanced it is by tampering with it. Write "The tree is green" and you get a plain fact. Write "the tree is so hazy" and the line becomes more formal and less urgent. As it stands, "tree is so hazy" feels like something being noticed for the first time, in the middle of looking, and that sense of a perception caught before it has settled is what the poem is really about.