Seven tercets, each a small snapshot, and not one tells you what to feel. Dave Bonta's "Mountain state (1)" reads like a hiker's notebook that has been trimmed to its sharpest lines. The place names (Dry Fork, Otter Creek, Dolly Sods) and the title's echo of a state nickname suggest West Virginia, though the poem never says so. The numeral in the title hints that this is the first of a sequence, but that is an inference. What the poem does give us is a series of encounters with a landscape that keeps refusing to match the words people have attached to it.
The form is haiku-like without being strict. The stanzas run short, long, short, and the syllable counts wander: "Camp at the woods' edge" is tidy, while "scored for tic-tac-toe: water fills all" sprawls well past a haiku line. There is no rhyme, and the sentences spill across line breaks. "Water fills all / the squares with zero" stops on "all" and then delivers the punchline a line later. That looseness suits the subject. The poem walks rather than marches, and each stanza is a stopping place.
Several stanzas turn on names that lie or disappoint. The Dry Fork is full of water. Its bed, divided by cracks or stones into a grid, looks "scored for tic-tac-toe," and the water fills every square with a zero. The joke is that zeros are the noughts of the game, but they are also nothing, so the stream is both playing and emptying. Then comes Otter Creek, with "steep banks, big boulders, / pools – everything but otters." The dash gives a small pause before the deflation, and "everything but" turns the name into a promise the creek does not keep. Both stanzas show the same gap between what a place is called and what it is.
The middle of the poem moves from jokes to something richer, and the senses take over. Sun "brings rhododendrons / into your tent," a lovely reversal in which the flowers seem to enter the tent while the light only touches them. The shift to "your" puts the reader inside the tent. At Dolly Sods, wind slowing down is "delicious," a taste word for a smell, and the colon lets the azaleas arrive as the reason. Then the mood darkens: "When they cut the forest, / the soil burned off." The "they" is anonymous and the verbs are blunt. The poem implies logging followed by fire without explaining it. Yet the next line gives "Bleeding hearts / bloom among the rocks." The flower's name is grim, set beside the burned soil, but the verb is "bloom." The poem lets damage and recovery sit side by side without deciding which has the last word.
That restraint makes the closing stanza work. "On two different hikes / I looked at lichens & left / the map in my pack." The speaker appears for the first time, and "I" arrives with a small confession. The ampersand is casual, like a note jotted on the trail. Lichens are about as far as nature gets from the first stanza's hayfield and deer. They are low, slow, and easy to miss, and the speaker's attention has dropped from the mountaintop to the surface of a rock. The map, a tool that gives a place names and coordinates, stays unopened. After a poem full of misleading names (Dry Fork, Otter Creek), leaving the map in the pack feels like a decision. The speaker would rather look closely than check where they are.
The poem is significant because it makes its argument without arguing. Absence runs all through it: the uncut hayfield, the missing otters, the vanished forest and the unused map. But the poem is not mournful. The doe's ear twitches, the water fills the squares, and the flowers come up. It suggests that the way to know a place is to pay attention to what is actually there, even when that is not what the label promised. The poem is short enough to read in half a minute, and it leaves the reader with that habit of looking.