Mike Stone's "Is This It? #2" opens with an exclamation that sounds almost old-fashioned, "O the deliciousness of the moment", and then spends the rest of its length wondering which moment it meant. The earth, we are told, "decides all by itself" to turn "from the oppressive summer heat / To the cool breath of winter." The change is huge and silent, and the speaker nearly misses it. That near-miss becomes the poem's real subject: how much of life happens at the edge of our attention, and how hard it is to know, while it is happening, which moments will count.
The poem's first example of being distracted is gloriously small. Daisy, apparently the speaker's dog, "leapt to catch the leash in her mouth / And wrest it from my unsuspecting hand." The verb "wrest" makes a comic scuffle sound almost epic, and "unsuspecting" shows a man whose mind was elsewhere, perhaps on the very season he is praising. The dog, meanwhile, is "Pleased with herself we'd had a good walk / Whatever that is in the heart of her mind." The grammar is compressed, with a "that" missing, so the lines tumble forward the way a pleased dog might. The phrase "heart of her mind" fuses feeling and thought, and the shrugging "whatever that is" admits that we can never fully know another creature's experience of a moment. The speaker is humble here, and funny.
Then the poem stops and asks directly: "Is this it? / Or is that it? / Here or there?" The lines get short and breathless. The word "it" carries the weight, because it points at something the poem never names. It also works two ways. "Is this it?" can be a cry of wonder, as in *this is the moment*, or the flat disappointment of *is this all there is?* The poem lets both readings hover. The question that follows is its most unsettling: is the key moment "the thing that I'll remember for the rest of my life / Or the thing that will be remembered instead of me?" The second option is startling. It suggests that something might outlast the person who lived it, a kind of stand-in left behind. Judging by the wording, the poem is thinking about death and legacy, though it does so lightly, between a dog and a change of weather.
The ending turns personal. "I almost missed it like when / I almost missed the look of your smile / When it got up in the morning / On the day you changed from young to old." Stone personifies the smile as something that wakes and rises, which keeps the image tender and domestic. The unnamed "you" is clearly someone the speaker knows well. The poem suggests a long familiarity, but it does not say who. The last line also closes a loop. Ageing is gradual, yet here it happens on a single "day," just as the earth's slow slide from summer to winter was pictured as one decision. Summer and winter start to read as youth and age, and the "oppressive" heat and "cool breath" give the change an odd, accepting calm. It is not mourned so much as tasted, the "deliciousness" of the opening.
Structurally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme, and it relies on speech rhythms. The long, loose lines of the dog episode feel conversational, while the clipped questions in the middle sound like a mind catching itself mid-thought. The repeated "I almost missed it" holds things together, first as a mild confession and then as a more painful one. The "#2" in the title hints that this question belongs to a series, though that is an inference from the title alone.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about attention. It does not pretend that the big moments announce themselves. A leash, a season, a smile on an ordinary morning: any of them might be "it." The fact that the speaker *almost* missed them also means he caught them, and the poem is the evidence.