Dave Bonta's «twilight pond» mixes short haiku-like lines with prose, following a speaker who lingers by a mountaintop pool as darkness falls. The opening image of a porcupine putting one foot in the water sets a quiet, careful tone. Then the scene starts to play tricks: the moon's reflection breaks apart, the pond seems bottomless, the path home feels twice as long. The speaker admits these are illusions, yet the snarl from the spruce grove still gets treated half-playfully as a bobcat's.
What the speaker feels is a mix of unease and delight. Night enlarges everything, and even our daytime names and identities hang loose, like pajamas. The meteor passing silently beyond a jet adds a sense of vast scale. The ending turns warm and tender: hearing sleepy songbirds feels like a privilege, a glimpse into a wild creature's unconscious mind. The mood is hushed, dreamy, and full of wonder.