Nobody in these seven short stanzas complains about the weather, and that is what makes them quietly unusual. A wet summer could easily be a grievance, with ruined plans and a sulky sky. Dave Bonta's poem treats it as a setting to be lived in. Rain, hail, mud and thunder arrive one after another, and the speaker answers each with something practical or curious: picking berries, washing, joking, eating indoors, hanging a shirt in a window. The central idea seems to be that attention is a form of acceptance. If you look closely enough at a soaked season, you find it is full of small, odd pleasures.
The form fits that idea. The poem is built from seven unrhymed tercets, each a separate glimpse, closer to a run of haiku-like notes than to a single argument. Several begin with verbless fragments: "A wet summer." "An indoor picnic." Others drop the subject altogether, as in "Done berry picking," which sounds like a line jotted in a notebook. The lines are short and plain, with no fixed syllable count and no end rhyme, so the poem moves at the pace of someone strolling and noticing. The title's word "Lines" invites a pun, since these are lines of verse but also the loose, trailing lines of a season's worth of days. The first stanza repeats the title almost exactly, as if the poem is clearing its throat before it starts.
The imagery is tactile and a little contradictory. "Twin peaks of gravel" turns a heap of stones at the mouth of a "hollow" into a miniature mountain range, so the landscape is shrunk to the scale of a driveway. The "storm-carved ruts" then "fill up with hailstones," which means the same storm both digs the channels and packs them with ice. Then the poem softens into color and slowness. "Blue damselflies / patrol the slow-moving waters / of the blueberry bog" has a lazy cluster of *b* and *l* sounds, and "patrol" is a nicely strict verb for such delicate insects. The word "bog" comes back twice in the next stanza, in "bog mud" and "brown bog water," and the repetition feels as heavy and sticky as the thing itself. The speaker washes mud off their legs with muddy water, a small paradox the poem lets stand without comment. In a wet summer, even getting clean means staying wet.
The only spoken voice arrives in the fifth stanza: "Morning thunder, / then rain. 'It's just getting it out / of its system, right?'" The line break after "out" nearly acts out the release it describes. The question treats the weather like a child's tantrum or a bout of illness, something that will pass once it has been expelled. The tag "right?" shows a speaker who wants reassurance, and a listener has quietly joined the poem. Until here the stanzas could have been written by someone alone, though "I" has appeared once, and only in the fourth.
The last two stanzas move indoors. In "An indoor picnic," the rain has not canceled the outing, only relocated it. The child climbing "the steep stairs / to the green room" brings a note of playfulness, and the green of the room, set beside the blue damselflies and the brown bog, completes a small palette of damp-summer colors. The final image is the most hopeful: "In lieu of a curtain, / a checkered shirt catches / the evening sun." A makeshift curtain is a humble, improvised object, yet it is what the light touches. The sun is back, and the poem lets it fall on laundry. The phrase "in lieu of" is a formal, almost bureaucratic expression, and its gentle comedy sits well beside such a casual object.
What gives the poem its quiet significance is this refusal to inflate. Nothing is declared meaningful, and the seasons are not turned into symbols. The poem's own order does the persuading: it moves from storm to bog to kitchen to window and ends with light. Its wisdom is a matter of making do, finding the picnic, the joke and the shirt-curtain, and it shows how a few plain lines can make a wet summer seem worth having.