Nobody in this poem ever simply looks at a lake. The opening line, "View on the lake:", sounds like the caption under a postcard, and what follows is less a view than a series of ways of describing one. The second line is oddly circular: "a town at the foot of mountains surrounds the lake." The lake was named a moment ago and is named again, as if the poem were walking round the water without being able to step into it. The flat, informational tone is the first quiet trick. It promises plain description and then slowly withdraws it.
The third line is a fragment with no verb: "Brush drawing in grey wash and graphite." It reads like a museum label. The scene has changed from a place into an object made of materials, so the poem is no longer looking at a lake but at a picture of one. Or perhaps it is looking at the lake as if it were a picture, and it never says which. That ambiguity is where the poem lives.
The only line that seems to describe weather is "The fog changes with the heat." It is the one moment of real process, fog thinning as the temperature rises, and it undermines the drawing, because a drawing in grey wash cannot change while the thing it records does. The sentence immediately turns into a comparison, though: the fog changes "like the copy of a watercolour, / (the original an unidentified piece)." The layers stack up. The fog is compared to a copy, and the copy has lost its original. The parentheses sound like a cataloguer's aside, and "unidentified" is almost comic, since a copy depends on an original that nobody can now point to. There is also a slip worth noticing. The picture was a drawing in wash and graphite, but the copy is of a watercolour. The poem moves between media the way fog moves between shapes, and nothing stays fixed.
The next comparison drops from the gallery into the body: "like morning breath in winter." Breath on a cold morning is pale, visible and vanishing, which suits fog well. But "morning breath" also has an unglamorous, faintly funny edge. After the dignified art-historical vocabulary, something human and slightly unflattering walks in, and the lake briefly seems to be alive.
Then the poem folds back on itself: "or the resemblance of a simile." This is the hinge. A simile is already a resemblance, so the fog is now compared to a resemblance of a resemblance. The chain of "like… like… or" has moved further from the lake at every step, through drawing, copy, breath and simile, and it ends at the machinery of comparison itself.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme. Its structure comes from repetition (lake, lake), short lines and punctuation. A colon opens the poem, a full stop closes the caption, parentheses interrupt the middle, and the similes then run on with no full stop at all, as if they could go on forever. The stanza breaks work like pauses to look again, each one giving the next attempt at description some room.
The final word, "Como", stands alone. After a poem of comparisons, a reader who knows Spanish may hear the word for "like" or "as", the very hinge of a simile. The title, however, is spelled "Cómo", with the accent that makes it the Spanish question "how?". Whether or not that is intended, the pairing is suggestive. The poem asks how a place can be described and answers with the word for comparing. The word is also just the name of the town, the plain fact the poem has been circling and postponing. The accent that disappears between the title and the last line is itself a small imperfect copy, and the poem's whole subject fits into one dropped mark.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so few words. It lets the reader watch a description lose confidence in itself, and it never claims that language can hold a landscape. Each image, whether picture, copy, breath or simile, is honest about being a substitute. The fog that "changes with the heat" is the poem's best emblem of its own method: whatever is said about the lake will shift a moment later, and the poem accepts that.