Nobody in these three lines says what the trouble is, and that silence is where the poem lives. The speaker has a "little trouble," and it is making him or her "lie at the office." We never learn whether it is a hangover, a worry, a secret, or a person. What we get is the effect: a small, slightly shabby act of dishonesty in the middle of an ordinary workday. Then the poem looks away from the desk and out at "morning mist."
The most interesting word is "lie," because it works two ways. The obvious reading is that the trouble forces the speaker to tell untruths, perhaps to cover for a late arrival or to say "I'm fine" when things are not. But a second, stranger reading hovers nearby, in which the trouble makes the speaker lie down, or lie low, at work. The poem never chooses, and the ambiguity suits its subject. A person who is hiding something rarely commits to a single story.
The grammar adds to the slipperiness. Read slowly, "my little trouble / making me lie" can be taken as a pun on "troublemaking," as though the speaker were describing a pet or a child, someone small and mischievous and impossible to disown. That word "little" is doing quiet work. It shrinks the problem and makes it affectionate, the way people talk about their vices when they are not ready to take them seriously. The trouble is small, yet it still gets the speaker to lie, and the poem lets that contradiction sit there.
The form is haiku-like without being strict. Three short lines, a season word, and a dash that cuts the human situation off from the natural image are all familiar haiku habits. The syllable count, however, runs roughly five, eight, three. The middle line, "making me lie at the office," is the longest and slowest, stretched out like the workday it describes. The last line shrinks to "morning mist," only three syllables, and the poem fades the way mist does once the sun gets to it. There is no rhyme, but there is a soft hum of m sounds: *my*, *making*, *me*, *morning*, *mist*. They tie the opening confession to the closing image, and they sound a little like mumbling, which is how most small lies are told.
The dash is the hinge of the poem. Before it, we are indoors, in a room with desks and obligations. After it, we are given weather. The poem does not say how the two are connected, and the reader has to build the bridge. The mist may be what the speaker sees through a window, or what the speaker remembers from the commute. Either way it plays a double role. It is a literal picture of early morning, and it is also an image of blurred outlines, of things not quite visible, which is exactly the condition of a half-truth. Nothing in the poem tells us the mist is a comment on the lie, but nothing prevents us from feeling that it is.
The title adds one more layer. "Early autumn" is the season word that anchors the haiku, and "early" matters. The season has not yet fully arrived, much as the speaker's dishonesty is only beginning and is still small enough to call "little." Judging by the imagery, autumn is also a time of fading and turning inward, and the mist gives that mood a physical form without the poem ever naming a feeling.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. Haiku are often associated with mountains, ponds, and temples, but this one sets its moment of human weakness in an office, a place most readers know well. It does not condemn the speaker or excuse the lie. It records the moment with dry honesty and then lets the mist speak. In seventeen or so syllables it manages to be funny, uncomfortable, and quietly beautiful, which is a good deal of work for a poem that begins with something as modest as a "little trouble."