A poem called "Lines for a June heat wave" might be expected to sweat and swelter. Dave Bonta's barely mentions the heat. Instead it gives ten three-line snapshots from a season: a groundhog, a butterfly, a squirrel, a dish of fruit, a beetle in a sink. Its central idea is that attention is a kind of shelter. The heat is there at the edges, but what the speaker mostly records is what he notices while it presses down, and the noticing keeps the days from blurring together.
The form is as unshowy as the subject. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only short, speech-like lines grouped into tercets. The compression feels haiku-like, but nobody is counting syllables. Each stanza is a single observation, and most end on a small turn, a punch line, or an image left to hang. The opening is the funniest: "Wait while I get the camera," I say, / & it does." The groundhog's obedience is a joke, but it also sets the poem's tone, in which wild creatures and a human speaker meet on easy, almost courteous terms. The ampersand, used only here, adds a jotted-down, notebook feel, as if the poem were a record of things as they happened and not something polished afterward.
The poem's sharpest irony sits in its third stanza, the only one set indoors among human-made things: "In the air-conditioned mall, / the plastic flowers are safe / from the blistering heat." "Safe" is a deadpan word. The fake flowers are protected because they are not alive, and every other stanza shows what living things do under the same sun: glide, drink, bloom, get trapped. Next to this, the squirrel "drinking from a tap / in the base of an old elm" is a gentler piece of comedy. The label "Penn State squirrel" suggests a Pennsylvania setting, though the poem never says more. It turns an animal into a local character with an affiliation.
Time moves differently in this poem than in a mall. The speaker runs into someone he first met "17 years ago, / in cicada time," measuring his own life by an insect's long underground cycle. The monarch is "back from the south," so the season too is a return. The strawberry-and-rhubarb stanza is the one place where appetite takes over: "So good, I don't want to finish it." It is a small, honest wish to slow things down, and it quietly explains the whole poem, which works like a way of not finishing the day too fast. The package stamped "Royal Mail," with its "book of small stones," brings in the wider world. The phrase could name a title or an object, and the poem leaves that open. Either way, "small" links the stones to the other small things around them.
Work and nature rub against each other in the last stanzas. "Driving the tractor into the woods, / mountain laurel blooming / above the roar" lets the flowers sit above the noise, both literally and in the line break. Then comes the stanza after mowing: "I find a ground beetle trapped / in the kitchen sink." The poem doesn't say what he does about it. The beetle stays stuck at the bottom of a smooth white basin, and the reader is left to feel the small weight of it.
The poem ends on a dream: "A game in a dream: / no one knows the rules, or how to win. / I wake to heat lightning." This is the only stanza where the speaker's mind turns inward, and it is unsettling. Everywhere else the world makes a kind of sense, with a groundhog that waits and a butterfly you can recognize by its glide. In the dream no one knows the rules. Heat lightning, light without rain, closes the poem on a flash that promises relief and doesn't deliver it, which fits a heat wave well.
The poem's significance lies in how much it does with so little. It treats a list as a mood, humor and unease sit side by side, and it suggests that the way to get through a stretch of oppressive weather is to keep looking closely at what is still going on.