Breakfast in Dave Bonta's "Old Harry" is a plate of false clues. The first line serves up "red herrings", and the remaining seven lines behave as the phrase promises: they hand the reader trails that look important and may lead nowhere. That seems to be the poem's central idea, that a story can be built from misdirection, and that the pleasure lies in following the tracks even when they decline to arrive anywhere tidy.
"Red herring" lives two lives at once. As an idiom it means a misleading clue, and as food it means smoked fish, and the poem lets both sit on the table. Then the scale goes wrong. A "boot-heel hole as big as a horse" belongs to a tall tale, where a footprint can be the size of an animal. The path "through the forest" is cut "as if through a red regiment", a simile in which the trees seem to stand like ranks of soldiers with a lane opened between them. The poem doesn't say why they are red, though the colour carries on from the fish. Herrings and soldiers have nothing in common except their hue, so the images connect by dream logic rather than sense.
The sentence structure supports this. The first sentence, running up to the full stop after "regiment", has no main verb at all. It is a pile of evidence, a boot-print here and a path there, nothing moving. Action begins only when the second sentence does, and its verbs arrive in a rush: Old Harry "went out", "met", was "found", and a lock was "breaking". The poem moves from a crime scene to a story, like a detective tale told in reverse, with the clues first and the suspect last.
"Old Harry" is a traditional English nickname for the Devil, and the title seems to give the game away before the poem begins. Yet the poem keeps him small. He goes out "to buy a hat", an errand with the plain, nursery-rhyme swing of a folktale. The line is nearly regular, which makes it the most songlike in the poem, and the ordinariness is funny. The poem never says why the Devil needs a hat, so a reader may supply horns or simply a dapper afternoon. Then he "met the Greyhound". The capital letter turns it into a name, and the poem gives no help beyond that. It could be a dog, an inn, or something else entirely. Leaving it undefined is another red herring, and the reader must choose which trail to follow.
The speaker appears only in the penultimate line: "where I found him vexed". Until then the poem has no "I". The speaker arrives like a witness after the event and reports Harry's mood, not his guilt. "Vexed" is a mild, almost parlour-room word, set against the offence, "breaking the Lord's lock". A cosmic trespass is described as an annoyance, and the gap between the two produces the poem's dry humour. What the lock guards, and whether Harry broke it or is merely fretting over it, the poem refuses to say. The grammar even leaves it open whether he is vexed about a lock he broke or about the act of breaking it.
Sound does quiet work. "Boot-heel hole" lands three heavy syllables in a row, like footfalls, before "as big as a horse" scampers off. The h-sounds in "heel", "hole" and "horse" prepare for "Harry" and "hat", so his name seems to be pulled out of the landscape before he appears. The poem has no rhyme, but the final line ends on the clipped, clunking "Lord's lock", whose l and k sounds seem to shut the door.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so few words. It blends tall tale, fable and detective story, and it doesn't explain any of them. It teaches what a red herring is by being one, and it gives a small demonstration of how a reader goes looking for meaning in the details a poem lays out.