Dave Bonta's "Augury" begins with a question that sounds almost practical: now that the pool is gone, where can a person rest their eyes? The title suggests a bigger task. An augury is a sign read for what it says about the future, traditionally in the behavior of birds or the look of the sky. This speaker goes out to read the signs and finds every one of them bad. The poem is a haibun, which mixes prose with short haiku-like verses. Here the form lets two kinds of attention take turns: a wandering, anxious mind in the prose, and a compressed, startled one in the three-line breaks.
The first break is the poem's sharpest joke. "cracks in the mud / 100% chance / of chaos" borrows the language of a weather forecast, where "100% chance of rain" would promise relief. Here the certainty attaches to chaos, and the numeral and percent sign push a screen's vocabulary into a form that usually keeps to natural imagery. The sounds do their own work. The hard *k* and *ch* of "cracks," "chance" and "chaos" make the line itself seem to split. The verse has no rhyme and no strict syllable count. It runs short, medium, short, so the final line falls away like something giving out.
The long prose paragraph that follows is built on a repeated turn. The speaker notices something lovely, such as the tremble of Oswego tea leaves under pollinators, and then, in the words "soon I am mourning," is pulled away. The pattern comes back almost word for word with "But soon I am remembering an article." The repetition shows how thin the speaker's hold on the present moment is. Pleasure never lasts a full sentence before a worry arrives, and the worries come from two places: the ecological ("scarcity of butterflies") and the informational ("an article about a terrifying new category of monster storm"). The sentences are long and loosely linked by "while" and "and," so they drift and then snag.
The imagery is quietly connected. The "sudden fissures of light opening and closing without a sound" in the distant storm echo the cracks in the mud, so that even a beautiful sight carries the memory of drought. The silence matters too. The lightning is soundless and far off, while the katydids "test out their rattles," a phrase that makes the insects sound tentative, as if the season were rehearsing. Both are small, uncertain signals, and the speaker cannot tell what they add up to.
The most telling image comes last. Looking for Comet Neowise below Ursa Major, the speaker shows real knowledge of the sky, naming a comet and a constellation. Yet when the comet is described, the comparison comes from the screen: "the death-smear of a midge at the bottom of a monitor." The direction of that simile is the poem's central idea. The speaker has not simply gone outdoors to escape the phone. The phone has changed how the outdoors is seen, so that a comet becomes a smudge on glass. "Death-smear" also gives the faint comet a small, grim finality that fits the poem's mood.
The closing verse leaves its meaning open: "trying to recall / my touch-typing skills / the sound of rain." One reading is that fingers tapping a keyboard sound like rain, so the technology the speaker wants to escape quietly stands in for what is missing. Another is that rain is only a memory, as distant as a half-forgotten skill. The line "the sound of rain" has no verb and no resolution. After a poem full of looking, it ends on listening, and on something the speaker has not heard.
What makes "Augury" significant is that it treats climate worry and digital overload as one experience instead of two. It does not lecture. It shows a mind trying to be present in a summer night and being interrupted, again and again, by what it already knows. Its tone is wry and tired rather than panicked, which makes it feel honest. It offers no answer to its opening question, only the small act of going out to look.