A walk in the rain ought to be the simplest errand there is: put up an umbrella, go out, come back. Dave Bonta's "Mission creep" shows how quickly that plan falls apart. The speaker admits it halfway through: "i was only going / for a walk and now // i'm pondering the obligations of ferns / the prerogatives of feet." The title borrows a phrase from military and political language, for a task that swells past its original limits. The poem makes it gently comic and then quietly serious. The real mission of a walk, it suggests, is whatever the walker ends up noticing.
The military vocabulary is planted early. The feet wage a "forever / war on stasis," and the line break leaves "forever" hanging just long enough for the phrase "forever war" to flicker behind it. Meanwhile the ruts keep "reasserting themselves / through fresh stone," as if the old path refuses to be paved over. Walking becomes a campaign whose only enemy is standing still. Then comes the legal-sounding pair "obligations" and "prerogatives," which turns ferns and feet into citizens with duties and rights. The humour lies in that stiff, bureaucratic diction being applied to something as unbureaucratic as a fern "dancing erratically in the rain."
Then the thinking leaps. "A green tongue / snakes through everything" gives the plant world a voice and a hint of menace in one image. Two "as if" lines follow, and they read like the speaker trying ideas on. "As if wisdom grew on trees" twists a familiar saying, and the next line, "as if it were made of gray paper," makes the twist literal, since paper comes from trees. The "head-sized tumor / emitting hornets" is the strangest image in the poem. Judging by the gray paper and the hornets, it is a hornets' nest, and hornets do build such nests from chewed wood. The wisdom the poem pictures is man-made-looking, swollen, faintly diseased, and capable of stinging. It could even be a joke at the thinker's own expense, a head buzzing with thoughts it cannot switch off. The poem declines to flatter wisdom.
After that, the poem steps back into calm, exact observation with "or the way rain beads / on a jewelweed leaf." Everything slows. The water is "unable to find purchase / on such a smooth skin," and "purchase" quietly echoes the feet on their rutted path, since both are about grip. The drop "rolls and gathers / into the veins," and the words "skin" and "veins" make the leaf bodily, so the leaf and the earlier tumor belong to the same living, vulnerable world. The drops become "microcosms / in capsule form." A capsule can be a pill, a seed pod, or a spacecraft. Jewelweed does bear seed capsules, and the last sense brings the language of missions back in miniature.
The form supports all this. The poem is written in two-line stanzas, with no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, so it reads like a thought as it happens. Sentences leak across the stanza breaks ("going / for a walk and now"), just as the walk leaks beyond its purpose. The sound patterning is light but real: the *p* of "pondering" and "prerogatives," the *r* of "rain," "ruts" and "reasserting," the long, slow adverbs "complexly" and "erratically."
The final couplet, "my pace slows / to a creep," closes the loop. "Creep" now means literal slowness, and it also echoes the plants that snake and spread. As the speaker's thoughts expand, his body contracts toward a crawl, almost as if he is joining the green world. The poem's lasting appeal is that it treats distraction as a kind of attention. A walk that fails at being a walk succeeds at being something better, and it ends not with a conclusion but with a speaker who has stopped hurrying to reach one.