Six tiny scenes make up Dave Bonta's "Adirondack haiku," and together they read like a few pages torn from a travel notebook. They have no plot and no stated theme, only things noticed: a flute at dawn, a woman picking mushrooms, a boulder, a lake, a prison, a bit of grit. The idea that gathers beneath them is that a place isn't known through one grand impression. It is known through odd, accidental details, some funny, some unsettling, some very old.
The opening poem sets the tone with a joke. A camper plays "The Sound of Music" on a flute at dawn, and the speaker announces, flatly, "I'm plotting murder." The humor depends on timing. The first two lines are gentle and a little sentimental, and the last is three syllables of pure irritation. The wilderness here is not a hushed cathedral. It has other people in it, and they are annoying. The next poem swings to the opposite mood. A woman squats "to pluck puffballs / from a stump, her raincoat / pale in the dark woods." The plucking and puffballs share a hard *p*, which gives the line a small, crisp pop, and the pale raincoat against dark trees is the only image in the sequence that works like a photograph. We never learn who she is, which is why she lingers.
The third poem is the strangest and probably the best. A "glacial erratic" is a boulder dragged by ice and dropped far from where it began. The speaker addresses one: "Never mind how / you got here. Just sit." The tone is mock-grand, with that old-fashioned "O," and also tender. It's hard not to hear the traveler in the command. Anyone far from home, with a notebook and a campsite, might say the same to themselves. The poem makes a gentle joke of deep time too, since the rock's only job is to stay put.
After that, the poems turn toward people and history. In the fourth, a store's back window offers "a free view of the stormy lake / moving three ways at once." The word "free" gives the line a dry, thrifty humor, and the lake's triple motion is vivid without being explained. In the fifth, the setting is more loaded: "Not far from John Brown's grave, / a state prison looms / above the larch." John Brown was the abolitionist hanged in 1859, and he is buried in the Adirondacks at North Elba. The poem doesn't comment on this. It sets the grave of a man who fought slavery beside a place of confinement and lets the verb "looms" do the work. The larch, a delicate tree, makes the building seem heavier.
The last poem brings the sequence back to the notebook it seems to come from: "When I open the Adirondack / pages of my notebook, / two grains of sand fall out." It is quiet and almost accidental, but it echoes the glacial boulder. Ice shaped the landscape over huge stretches of time, and what the speaker carries home is two specks that slipped between pages. The lines break after "Adirondack," so the place name is left hanging at the end of a line, and then the pages and the sand tumble out. Small things hold a whole region.
Formally, Bonta treats the haiku loosely. These are not strict five-seven-five poems, and nothing rhymes. The lines are short, speech-like and unevenly measured, and many of them break in the middle of a phrase ("from a stump, her raincoat"). What survives from the haiku tradition is the compression, the concrete image, and the habit of leaving the final feeling unstated. The sequence also shows how much range a three-line poem can have, moving from comedy to eeriness to historical unease to something close to awe without ever raising its voice.
That range is what makes the poem worth reading. It treats a trip the way memory does, as a pile of unrelated fragments in which a flute, a boulder and a prison all count equally. The grains of sand at the end suggest why. They are tiny, but they came from somewhere real, and they stayed with the speaker.