Anyone who has gone out to watch birds knows the small letdown of arriving on a morning when nothing seems to happen. Dave Bonta's "Fog walker" starts from that letdown and then does something more interesting: it lets the speaker change his mind. The poem is about attention, and about how an impression of emptiness can turn out to be only the first thing you notice.
The form helps. The poem reads like a haibun, with two prose paragraphs, each followed by a three-line haiku-like verse. The prose is loose and conversational, a mind thinking aloud. The verses are tight and wordless about their own meaning. The prose says what is going on, and the verses show a single flash of seeing. Neither rhymes, and the verses don't follow a strict 5-7-5 pattern. The first is just 3, 6 and 2 syllables. The rhythm comes from voice and breath, not from a metre.
The first paragraph is a roll call of absences. The tanagers and warblers are "gone (or hiding while they molt)", and the parenthesis shows a speaker unwilling to claim more than he knows. Even the birds that remain are reduced to a "wood pewee" that "still calls" and a vireo that merely "interjects", as if it were a guest speaking out of turn. Then comes the best joke in the poem. The black gum tree, beginning "to color up", is imagined as anticipating "the need for signal flags saying FREE LUNCH." Judging by the wording, the changing leaves are a kind of advertising aimed at migrating birds. The tree is made to sound like a roadside café, which gives the season's turn a cheerful, practical tone instead of an elegiac one.
The verse that follows, "fog walker / the millipede's carpet / of legs", works differently. The title phrase could describe the speaker moving through mist, or the millipede itself, and the poem never decides. The image is precise and a little strange. A millipede's many legs ripple together into something soft and continuous, a "carpet" that is also moving. Using a household word for a creature in the leaf litter quietly echoes the domestic ritual of the "tea-drinking spot", and it suggests the speaker is at home here. Fog also blurs the view, which fits a poem about not being sure what is present.
The second paragraph opens with the most important sentence: "I take it back." The speaker corrects himself, because the black-throated green warbler and the robin are "still around, just rarely singing." The key shift is from absent to quiet, and the poem's lesson sits in the next line: "Sit here long enough and you'll hear everything." He then undercuts his own big claim with honest humour, "or at least everything audible over the trains and traffic sounds from the valley." The human world is not edited out. It sits alongside the birds, and the poem is more believable for admitting it.
Sound keeps dwindling. The cicada calls "just once and falling silent again", and the word "annual" makes even that single note part of a yearly cycle. Another motif is the half-finished: the sun "comes half out", and the speaker reads the time from his shadow, "nearly eleven", with no watch, only the sky and his own outline. The measurements are approximate and bodily, and the poem trusts them.
The last verse, "closed book / in my lap / a square of sunlight", is the quietest moment. The book, presumably the thing he came to read, stays shut. In its place the sun, no longer half hidden, lays a bright square on his lap, the shape of a page with nothing printed on it. We could read "closed book" as the idiom for something not yet understood, but the poem does not insist. It just lets reading give way to watching.
What makes "Fog walker" worth studying is how little it claims. It doesn't announce a lesson about nature or silence. It lets us watch an observer make a mistake, correct it, and find the correction more rewarding than the first impression. In a world that rewards fast conclusions, the poem argues that patience changes what you can hear, and that a closed book and a patch of sunlight can be enough for a morning.