The autumn equinox is a hinge in the year, the moment when day and night are evenly matched before the dark takes over. Dave Bonta's "The Hollow (1)" starts there and immediately does something odd: it shows us a beginning. A mosquito "takes its first steps / walking on water," a newborn insect casually managing what is traditionally told as a miracle. The comedy is quiet but real, since the sublime has been shrunk to the scale of a pest. Yet the season is wrong for starting out, and that mismatch, the sense that something is slightly off, drives the whole poem.
The form is spare. There is no rhyme, no punctuation, no capital letters, and the poem breaks into seven tiny stanzas, some only a line long. Those single lines work as hinges: "autumn equinox" sets the time, "the not-rightness of it" stops the poem to register unease, and "ecdysis" turns it toward its ending. Between them sit short, haiku-like images, each of which could almost stand alone. The title's "(1)" suggests this is the first of a series, though that is an inference from the title, not something the text tells us. The rhythm is accordingly unhurried, built from short lines that sound like observations noted down in the field rather than lines shaped to a metre.
The middle of the poem plays with language. "Where water sits / at the head of the hollow" lets the pool behave like a person, settling quietly at the top of the valley, and the next line completes the thought: "a bench for reflection." The phrase works twice over, because a still pool literally reflects, and a bench is where people go to think. Even the alliteration seems unhurried: "walking," "water," "where," "water" recur like ripples, and "head of the hollow" carries a soft breathy h. "Hollow" is also a landscape word that happens to mean empty, a hint planted early and picked up by the "empty husks" at the end.
Then comes "the not-rightness of it," the most awkward and the most honest line. The coined noun, stitched together with hyphens, sounds like a half-formed thought, as though the speaker has no tidy word for the feeling and so uses a clumsy one. The poem doesn't say what exactly is wrong, but the next image points to an answer: a "vernal pool," whose name belongs to spring, is "collecting / autumn leaves." The line break lets "collecting" hang for a moment before its object arrives, and the delay makes the gathering feel slow and deliberate. Spring's name and autumn's litter sit in the same water, just as a mosquito's first steps share a season with the year's decline.
The final stanza resolves this uneasy mixture. "Ecdysis" is the scientific word for the shedding of an outer skin, as insects do when they grow. After that long, clinical term the poem drops into plain, heavy monosyllables: "empty husks of former lives / sink into the mud." The movement of the poem is downward, from the surface the mosquito walks on to the sediment below. "Former lives" is the richest phrase. It can mean the discarded stages of the insect, but it also nudges us to think of the leaves as shed skins of the trees, and perhaps of our own earlier selves, left behind as we change.
What makes the poem significant is how much it holds without announcing any of it. Renewal and decay do not take turns here, because they happen in the same pool on the same day. The poem neither comforts us nor scolds us. It sets a bench by the water, offers a few exact images, and leaves the reflecting to us, which is exactly what its own metaphor invites.