A blister is an odd place to begin a poem about water, but Dave Bonta's "Canal haiku" starts there: "It's sandal season— / you bring back a blister / from the canal." The sequence sets its terms at once. There is a "you," a season, and a body that pays a small price for an outing. The canal is a place people actually walk to and return from, not a postcard view. The nine short poems after it read like notes from that walk, where nothing is grand and almost everything is slightly odd.
The central idea, as I read it, is that a canal gathers things that have no business together, and that noticing the mismatch is a pleasure. Light from the water plays on steel girders while a train screeches past. A boat flies the jolly roger over "gnomes and potted plants," which suggests a pirate costume on a very domestic vessel. Geese menace passers-by, pigeons queue behind a supermarket, and a drill rig is big enough to be measured in storeys. Nature, leisure, industry and repair sit side by side, and the poet doesn't rank them or explain them.
The form is looser than the word "haiku" suggests. The first poem runs five, six and four syllables, so Bonta isn't counting 5-7-5. He keeps what matters more: three short lines, a seasonal cue in "sandal season," and a habit of recording a moment without comment. There is no rhyme. The music comes from texture. "Screeching wheels" and "steel girders" are hard and grating, while "Light from the water / plays" slides along on liquid sounds. "Ding" imitates the bell it names. Even "green water" and "paints the boat green" are a rhyme of sorts, a repeated word that makes the painter's task look like an attempt to match the canal itself.
Syntax does a lot of the work, because many of these poems hold back their key noun until the last line. "Lowering their heads in threat / again and again: geese / with a single gosling." The first two lines build menace, and the colon then deflates it into something comic and a little touching, one small chick guarded by a whole hissing escort. The deaf dog works the same way, with a lovely irony: "You can find her by the ding / of bicyclists' bells." The sound that locates her is one she can't hear. The poem reads as affectionate rather than sad, and the dog seems to be a local fixture the speaker knows.
Some images quietly borrow each other's vocabulary. After the canal boat passes, "the huge floating leaf / reverses course," and the leaf becomes a ship turning about. "Huge" is only true at the scale of someone looking closely. The pigeons "line up," as if waiting their turn at a counter. Even the drill is described by comparison, "the drillers' four-storey screw," a machine measured in buildings. It is also the only poem set in the future tense, "where the high-speed / train will run," a reminder that this landscape is being rebuilt as the speaker walks through it.
The ending is the most pointed. The final poem is the only one built on found language: "End-of-life / destination for cars." It is the polite, bureaucratic phrase for a scrapyard, and the poem answers it with something plain: "and next door, stacks of tires." The dash lets the euphemism hang for a beat before the objects undercut it. Just before it, a man leans over the water to paint his boat, an act of upkeep. Placed together, the painter's care and the scrapyard's blunt arithmetic give the sequence a faint undertone of mortality, with things being maintained, worn out and stacked up.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it never preaches. Bonta finds interest in supermarkets, tires and construction rigs as readily as in light on water, and he trusts a few exact details to carry the humor and the unease. He keeps haiku's discipline of looking without explaining, but lets the subject be an ordinary, messy, lived-in place. A walk along a canal turns out to hold a whole small world, if you let it hold your attention.