A fly's wings beat too fast for anyone to follow, and Dave Bonta starts from that small impossibility. "How many strokes a fly / makes with her wings" is a question nobody could answer, and the poem's answer is that nobody has to. The leaves keep the tally. Behind the quiet joke of the title, "Accounting practice," sits the poem's central idea: nature does its bookkeeping without effort or anxiety, while people, who nest among the leaves and take "pleasure in everything," are uneasy with one kind of counting, the kind that measures time. The moon, "that pretty clock," is the exception.
The title does a lot of work. Accounting suggests ledgers, balance sheets, a world where everything is reckoned and owed. Yet the only accountants here are leaves, and the word "leaves" carries a second meaning, since a ledger is made of leaves too. The tally is both a tree's foliage and a book's pages. "Practice" means habit and routine, but it also means rehearsal, as if the leaves were quietly getting better at a job nobody assigned them. The fly's "strokes" are equally double. They are wingbeats, but also pen strokes, tally marks, and the strokes of a clock striking the hour. So the clock the poem ends on has been ticking inside its first line.
The poem is a single sentence with no punctuation and no capital letters, and that lowercase hush suits its mood. The grammar can be read more than one way. "Is a wonder the leaves tally" might mean the leaves count the wingbeats, or that the number is a wonder which only the leaves can hold. The same looseness lets "where we nest" attach to the leaves, so that we live inside the tally, sheltered by the thing doing the counting. "Nest" is a bird's verb, and putting it in human mouths makes us creaturely and small, tucked into the foliage like the fly.
There is no rhyme, but the sound is carefully tuned. The first stanza hums with w's: "wings," "wonder," then "where we" and "with" in the second. It is a soft, breathy sound, like wings or wind in leaves. Against that, "pretty clock" is all hard consonants, with the clipped *p* and *t* and the closing *ck* working like a tick. Then the last word, "moon," opens into a long, slow vowel, as though the clock had stopped ticking and gone silent. The lines also have a shape. Counting syllables, the first stanza runs six, four, eight, and the second three, seven, seven. In each stanza the lines grow toward a longer closing line, so each seems to gather itself before landing.
The line break before "but" is the poem's turning point. "With pleasure in everything" ends a line on total contentment, and then the next line begins with "but," a small reversal in a poem that has felt so relaxed. We are happy with everything except the moon. The phrase can be read as "pleasure in everything but the moon," or as "we nest in everything but the moon," meaning it is the one thing we cannot settle into. Both readings land in the same place. The moon is the slow, silvery calendar that counts months and, by implication, lifetimes. "Pretty" is the interesting word there. It could be affectionate or faintly sour, since we admire the very thing that reminds us how much time we have used. The poem doesn't say which, and that restraint is part of its charm.
What makes this small poem worth reading is how much it holds in six short lines. It sets two kinds of counting side by side. One is the fly's and the leaves', endless, wondering and unforced, where numbers are just part of being alive. The other is the clock's, which makes us feel our own running out. Bonta never states this. He gives us a fly, some leaves and a moon, and lets the pun on "leaves," the echo in "strokes" and the sudden "but" suggest the rest. A student reading it closely may notice how a poem can say something sad without sounding sad, and how a single word like "pretty" can hold both delight and unease.