A fallen log is a good place to learn what a tree was guarding against. Dave Bonta's "Knots" starts there, on the ground, where knotholes outlast almost everything around them and "stare up" like "eye sockets / that never belonged to a skull." The image gives a small jolt. For a moment the forest floor looks like a graveyard, and then the last line corrects us. These are not the remains of something dead. The tree grew them, and the rest of the poem explains why.
The explanation arrives in a calm, almost field-guide voice: "It makes sense that trees would grow / their hardest wood around the weakest / points in their architecture." The word "architecture" turns the tree into a building, and the poem keeps its tone matter-of-fact. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only plain sentences broken into lines of uneven length, so the poem sounds like someone explaining something they find fascinating. The ampersands that replace "and" throughout add to this. They look like quick notebook shorthand, but they also work as little knots in the text, joining one clause to the next.
The second stanza goes further and builds its own weaving into the syntax. The collar is made "first from the branch / as it overlaps onto the trunk / & then from the trunk / as it overlaps onto the branch." The sentence crosses over itself in the same pattern it describes. Reading it, you feel the two kinds of wood passing over each other.
When the poem reaches the branch core, its vocabulary turns defensive. The core is a "spear" of "decay-resistant wood" that keeps "the agents of rot at bay." Military language sits oddly beside the gentle word "architecture," and the clash is useful, because it shows the tree is under constant attack and not simply growing. The enjambment helps too. "The flared / base facing outward" breaks on "flared," so the line spreads before the thought finishes. Then a short sentence lands flat: "This is the knot." After all the description, the definition is almost blunt.
The final stanza opens with a list of technical terms: "intergrown & encased knots, loose & sound / & pin knots, red & black knots." Specialist jargon turns out to sound like poetry, with its paired adjectives and plain, strange names. Then the pronouns shift. The poem began by telling "you" where to find knotholes, and now it says "we who know them only from lumber." The reader is included as an amateur, someone who has seen knots only in planks and shelves. Our guess that they are "hard pills the tree / had been unable to dissolve" gets a gracious reply: "We would not be wrong." The poem does not correct the layman. It adds to what he already half-knew, and it gives the tree a body that swallows and fails to digest.
Then comes the ending: "Each time a tree says yes to the sun / a no begins to form, firm & sharp / & pointed inward." A branch is a tree's yes, reaching toward light, and it is also a wound waiting to happen, an opening where rot can enter. The tree answers by growing a no inside itself. The hard consonants of "firm & sharp" and the monosyllables "yes" and "no" make the line feel clipped and certain, and "pointed inward" turns the spear's direction back on the tree itself.
The poem never says what this might mean for people, and that restraint is its strength. A reader can hear a quiet argument that openness and self-protection cannot be separated, and that every way we reach outward leaves some hardened place behind. But the poem earns that idea by staying with wood, collars, cores and rot. It takes a fact most of us walk past, the dark whorl in a plank, and shows that it records both how a tree grew and what it had to defend. After reading it, you are likely to see a knot in a table or a fence post differently.