A mountain, in this poem, becomes "real" only when something is hidden from view. That is the odd bargain at the start of Dave Bonta's "Effigies": clouds cover the summit, the turbines vanish, and Ice Mountain is for a moment what the speaker feels a mountain ought to be. The word "again" carries a lot of weight. It admits that the mountain's realness has already been lost and can be recovered only by subtraction, by weather doing what the eye alone can't.
The second stanza pulls our gaze down, physically ("Below") and morally. The subdivision is "ugly," the poem's one openly judgmental word, and at first it seems to belong with the turbines as another human scar on the slope. Then the sentence continues, and the ugliness changes meaning: this is where "a black family once woke / to a burning cross." The line break does quiet work here. We reach "woke" and pause, waking up before we know what to. The stanza also has no main verb. It never says what the subdivision does, so it hangs there as a fragment, as if the speaker can't make the sentence move on. "Once" seems to push the event into the past, but because the poem places it directly beneath a mountain that is trying to look timeless, the past doesn't stay put.
Only in the final stanza does an "I" appear, and what the speaker does is small and concrete: "I find a shed antler on the powerline." Even this sentence carries two worlds. "Shed" is what an animal does when it lets something go, and the powerline is human infrastructure, so the antler lies where wildness and engineering overlap. Then comes the simile: "a twisted Y like the bottom half / of a stick figure." A stick figure is the barest picture of a person, a child's shorthand, and here it is only half there. The top of the body is missing, much as the top of the mountain is missing in the first stanza. That echo may be deliberate. Something is always cut off or covered.
The title explains why the antler matters. An effigy is a likeness of a person, traditionally something made to be mocked or burned. A burning cross works in a similar way, a staged symbol meant to threaten real people. The antler is an effigy by accident, shaped by an animal's body and not by anyone's hatred, yet the speaker's mind still turns it into a human shape. One could also say that a "twisted Y" is a bent relative of the cross, though the poem never says so, and its restraint is part of its force. After the second stanza, it suggests, the mind can't stop seeing figures and crosses in the landscape.
Formally, the poem is three unrhymed tercets in free verse, with no regular meter and short, plain lines. Its diction is mostly flat and reportorial ("Clouds hide the top," "I find a shed antler"), and that flatness makes the central image colder. Nothing is dramatized, and the cross burning gets the same level tone as the antler. The compression and the habit of setting images side by side without comment recall haiku, though the poem doesn't follow a 5-7-5 count. The gaps between the stanzas are where the reader has to make the connections.
The poem is significant because it won't keep two kinds of damage apart. Turbines on a ridge and a hate crime in a housing development might normally belong to different conversations, one about the environment and one about society. Here they share a single view, and the poem implies that the pleasing look of a place often depends on what is hidden, whether by clouds or by silence. The ending offers no moral or consolation. It gives only a found object and a faintly human shape, left for the reader to read.