Fog is a kind of editor. It deletes the horizon and leaves a person with whatever is close enough to see, and that is the principle behind Dave Bonta's four short pieces. Each one catches a small, unglamorous fragment of a single misty July morning. The central idea is that when the big view disappears, attention tightens, and the tiny, the odd and the missing become more vivid than any landscape could be.
The first "take" is the boldest. A foggy porch sounds like the start of a quiet, reverent nature poem, and then comes "Two blowflies are fucking / on my knee." The blunt verb, a plain monosyllabic word in the middle of a soft setting, works like a joke at the expense of poetic solemnity. The line break helps. "Two blowflies are fucking" lands as a flat statement, and "on my knee" arrives as an afterthought that makes the speaker not an observer above nature but a piece of furniture in it. Blowflies are usually associated with rot, so there is a quiet irony in seeing them busy with creation, even if the poem never comments on it.
The second stanza moves from touch to sight, and from the body to the world. "I can't focus on anything / but that one red branch." The word "focus" does double duty. It describes a camera-like blurring caused by fog, and it describes the mind's inability, or unwillingness, to settle elsewhere. Red against grey-white is the only strong colour in the frame, so the branch dominates simply because everything else has been bleached out. The poem doesn't say why the branch is red, and that restraint keeps it a pure act of noticing rather than an explanation.
In the third stanza, sight fails and hearing takes over: "I count the bird songs to see / which ones are missing." This is the most thoughtful moment of the sequence. Counting is an orderly, almost scientific habit, and the enjambment after "to see" lets the sentence turn on its final word, "missing." The speaker is listening for absence. The poem leaves open whether this is just the hush of late summer or something more worrying. The shift from "July" to "late July" shows time slipping forward, and the reader may sense an undertone of loss without being told to feel it.
The last piece is the only one that doesn't begin with "Foggy." The first three stanzas open with variations on one phrase ("Foggy morning porch," "Foggy July morning," "Foggy morning, late July"), a loose refrain that shifts its word order each time and gives the sequence a gentle, slightly hypnotic rhythm. Breaking the pattern with "Sun through fog" signals that the weather is changing. The closing image is the strangest and most beautiful: "the trees' shadows stretch / half-way to the ground." Shadows normally lie on surfaces, but in thick mist sunlight makes the air itself visible, so shadows seem to hang in mid-space and fade before they land. Fog has been taking things away all morning, and here it shows something new.
The form is deliberately light. There is no rhyme, and the lines are short, uneven and close to speech. Each piece runs to three lines, which recalls haiku in its brevity, though the syllable counts are not strict. The title's phrase "four quick takes" suggests snapshots rather than a polished argument, and it borrows from photography, where a "take" is also a way of seeing. Across the four, the senses move from touch and sight to hearing and back to sight, and the setting moves from closed-in and murky to bright and open.
The poem matters because it avoids grand statements and still ends up saying something true about attention. It treats a crude insect scene, a single red branch, a gap in birdsong and a floating shadow as equally worthy of notice. It also suggests that limited vision isn't a deprivation: with the horizon gone, a person looks harder at what is left.