A cowboy, in the usual story, is a man of big skies and few words, and his loneliness comes with a kind of glamour. Dave Bonta's three tiny poems keep the loneliness and drop the glamour. What is left is an empty field, some regretted conversation, and a man in a truck who would rather be somewhere else, or perhaps nowhere near anyone. The central idea seems to be that solitude is double-edged. It can be a refuge and a wall, and the speaker is not sure which one he has built.
The first piece sets the scene in two words: "noon field—". Noon is the hour of least shadow, when everything is visible and nothing is hidden, and the dash after "field" leaves a pause that feels like a long look around. Then comes the line that carries the humour: "I find nobody / and a horse." Grammatically, "nobody" and "a horse" are treated as two things discovered side by side, as though an absence and an animal were the same kind of find. The horse is the one thing a cowboy poem is expected to supply, and here it arrives almost as a consolation prize. It is company, but it is not "somebody." The "n" sounds of "noon" and "nobody" also echo each other, so the emptiness gets a little music of its own.
The second piece changes mood and, noticeably, loses its "I." "After foolish talk" does not say who talked or who was foolish. The speaker may be embarrassed by his own words, or tired of other people's, and the missing pronoun lets both readings stand. What follows is the poem's most surprising word choice: "the discourse / of rain." "Discourse" is a stiff, scholarly word, the sort used for lectures and debates, and setting it beside rain is both funny and tender. Human talk was foolish, but the rain, which says nothing in words, is granted the dignity of real conversation. Silence here is not an absence but a better kind of speech. The line break after "the discourse" holds the word up for a moment before the rain is allowed to arrive.
The last piece brings in the modern world. The horse has been replaced by "my truck," and the cowboy's old independence is now steel, glass and an engine. "I keep / a great distance / in my truck" can be read in two ways. On the surface, he drives far away from people. But "keep" is a verb for possessions and promises, so the distance sounds like something he owns and looks after, like a pet or a vow. The truck becomes a shell that holds the distance in. The short, flat phrasing offers no explanation or apology, and that restraint makes the line more revealing than a confession would be.
In form, the poems borrow the haiku's brevity but not its strict counting. None of the three follows the familiar 5-7-5 pattern. Each is a handful of syllables, a quick image or gesture in three lines, and none uses rhyme. Yet there are faint echoes across the sections: "horse" in the first piece and "discourse" in the second share a sound, as if the pieces were quietly answering one another. The lines are plain, spoken-sounding English with almost no decoration, which suits a speaker who distrusts big talk.
Read in order, the three pieces form a small arc: finding no one, talking badly, then driving away. The title adds the final irony. "Cowboy" promises toughness and a code of silence, while "haiku" promises a form built on quiet observation. The poem suggests that the two traditions fit together uneasily but truthfully, since both are about being alone with the world.
The poem is worth reading for how much it leaves out. It gives no backstory and no reason for the foolish talk, and it never tells us whether the distance is a comfort or a loss. A reader has to decide, and that open question is where the poem stays with you.