Dave Bonta's poem reads less like a story than a scattering of odd, vivid scenes, and part of the pleasure is that they never fully explain themselves. It opens with "red herrings to breakfast," a phrase that suggests false trails and misdirection, and the poem keeps that promise: nothing here points cleanly to an answer. A huge boot-heel hole runs through the forest, and the path seems to cut through "a red regiment," an image that mixes soldiers, color, and woods into something both physical and dreamlike.
Then Old Harry appears, a figure who goes out to buy a hat and runs into the Greyhound. The speaker finds him annoyed, apparently over "breaking the Lord's lock." The poem doesn't say what that means, but the tone feels half comic, half uneasy, as if a small errand has turned into a guilty brush with something larger. The speaker mostly observes, and the mood is mysterious and playful, with a faint shadow of trespass.