Three lines, no verbs, no punctuation: Dave Bonta's "Fourth quarter" is built the way a glance works. The eye goes up to a moon that has no business being visible at noon, then down to two boys swearing at a ditch, then inward to an "I" who admits to wearing a disguise. Sky, ground, self, all in under twenty words.
The title does quiet work. A fourth-quarter moon is the half-lit moon of the waning cycle, one that can still be seen in the daytime sky, so "the late moon" is late in two ways: late in the month and late in the day, still hanging around in "noon light" when it should have gone. "Fourth quarter" also carries its sporting sense, the last stretch before the whistle, and it is hard to read the poem without a faint feeling that something is running down. The poem never says whose time it is. The hint is there to take or leave.
The second line drops from that pale height into mud. "Two boys cursing a ditch" is funny and precise. Cursing *at* a ditch is a small, absurd quarrel with a piece of landscape, and because "cursing" is a participle, the boys are caught mid-oath and never finish. We are not told why. Perhaps they are stuck or have fallen in, or they simply can't get across. Withholding the reason is what makes the picture so sharp. Swearing also seems to be a performance here, boys trying out a rough, grown-up voice on the nearest thing that won't answer back, though that is an inference from the image rather than something the poem states.
The sound shifts with the scene. The first line is all soft, open consonants, l and n and m, and "noon" and "moon" close the line around each other like an internal rhyme, a small round hum. The second line turns hard and clipped: the c of "cursing," the d and t of "ditch," a word that lands like a boot in the muck. The line endings (moon, ditch, disguise) do not rhyme, and there is no regular meter. The lines run six, six and seven syllables, so the last one overruns slightly, as if the speaker cannot quite fit inside the pattern the other two set up. The long *i* of "light" returns in "I," "my" and "disguise," which gives the closing line an echo of the first and quietly links the speaker to the moon.
That last line is the strangest. "My ship disguise" can be read several ways. The speaker may be dressed as a ship, or pretending to be a vessel, or seeing himself that way. The grammar will not settle it, and the poem is better for that. There is a watery undercurrent running under the whole scene. The moon governs tides, a ditch is the smallest imaginable sea, and a half moon in the sky can look like a boat. In that light the speaker becomes the ship that sails the ditch, a grand costume for a very small body of water. Boys who curse, meanwhile, are at least talking like sailors.
Disguise seems to be the poem's central idea. The moon is in disguise, a faint ghost of itself in the glare of midday. The boys, if I am reading them right, are disguised in adult roughness. And the "I," who arrives with a plain "and," just one more item in the list, admits to a costume of his own. He does not stand above the scene as a commentator. He is another thing caught out of its proper hour and dressed as something it isn't. The tone is gently self-mocking, but the self-mockery has some tenderness in it, as if everyone and everything in view is playing a part a little too big for it.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it trusts the reader. With no verbs to push the action forward, the scene stays still, like a photograph, and we have to supply the story: why the boys are cursing, what the ship is, whether "fourth quarter" is about a moon, a game, or a life. It resembles haiku in its brevity and its attention to a single moment, but it ends on a confession instead of a nature image, and that turn, from looking at the world to admitting how one is dressed to face it, is the poem's real surprise.