Six tiny scenes, each only three lines long, add up to a quiet argument: the ground under our feet is full of landscapes, and we are in them. Dave Bonta's title, "Recent photoblog haiku," suggests these were short captions for pictures, though the poems work perfectly well without them. Each one records something noticed, and the pleasure lies in how closely, and how oddly, the noticing is done.
The form is loose. Syllable counts wander: "blossoming witch hazel" has six, "I pound a stuck storm window" has seven, and "with its tail" has only three. There is no rhyme. What survives from haiku is compression and juxtaposition, two things set side by side with the link left for the reader to make. The opening poem does this with a joke. A witch hazel is in bloom, and the speaker, apparently trying to get a jammed window open, hammers at it with a Chinese dictionary. A book full of another language's words becomes a blunt tool. The sounds help: "pound a stuck storm window" is thick with heavy consonants and almost thuds. Beauty outside, clumsy effort inside, and the speaker is plainly part of the comedy.
The next poems turn to creatures and plants. The newt "even on land… still steers / with its tail" is a small marvel of the word "still," which carries the idea of habits outliving the place that made them. It's hard not to read a human echo into it, though the poem never says so. Then comes the most layered piece. "Where it lost a limb" presumably describes a tree, since the "glimpse of twisted heartwood" gives that away, but the poem lets us take a moment to work this out. The last line, "mosquito in my ear," drops in with a sound-picture of its own: the long *ee* of "mosquito" and "ear" is the insect's whine. The wounded tree and the nagging bite sit together, and the speaker is reminded that he is flesh too.
Cracks keep recurring. Gnats follow "the branching cracks / in [the] skin" of an old bolete, a phrase that makes the mushroom's surface look like a map, with the gnats as travellers on its roads. Then "first rain in weeks" makes "the dry canyons in my moss garden / disappear." The scale shift is the delight here. A garden of moss becomes a canyon country, and the rain closes it up. The line break before "disappear" does the job itself, so that the word comes alone at the end and the canyons vanish. The possessive "my" is gently funny, since the speaker owns a landscape that a downpour can erase in minutes.
If you read the six in order, they move from breakage (a stuck window, a lost limb, cracked skin, parched moss) toward a harsher image. The final poem sets "night-blooming cereus" beside "two spiders" that "feed / on a white moth." A flower that opens only in the dark is exactly the kind of thing that draws a moth, and the spiders are waiting. Loveliness and appetite arrive together, and the poem offers no comment. The enjambment after "feed" holds back the victim for a beat, which lets the pale moth land softly at the end.
What gives the sequence its significance is its refusal to make nature either a postcard or a sermon. Small events, a newt's tail, gnats on a mushroom, are treated as seriously as a bloom or a death. The speaker is never a distant observer: he pounds, he is bitten, he owns a patch of moss. By letting the reader find the links between rain and cracks, wounds and heartwood, beauty and predation, the poems make us do the looking too, and we end up seeing how much happens in a few square feet.