Dave Bonta's six short haiku read like entries from a travel notebook, each catching a moment of a trip to the Adirondacks. The tone shifts from one to the next. The first is funny: a flute playing "The Sound of Music" at dawn is enough to make the speaker joke about murder. Then the mood turns quieter and stranger. A woman crouches in the dark woods, her raincoat pale, gathering puffballs, and the picture feels half real, half ghostly.
The third addresses a "glacial erratic," a boulder left behind by ice, and tells it to rest. It's a gentle joke, and it also seems to be about the speaker's own sense of being out of place. The stormy lake "moving three ways at once" shows nature as restless and unpredictable, while the state prison looming over the larch trees adds something heavy and human to the landscape. The final haiku ends softly: two grains of sand fall from the notebook, small physical proof that the place has stayed with the speaker.