A train horn is the first thing we hear in Dave Bonta's poem, and it is never mentioned again. It sits alone on its line like a sound drifting in from somewhere else, a reminder that the hollow is not sealed off from the modern world. After that the poem narrows its attention to a walk through woods: a pool, some mosquitoes, a missing bird, a charcoal hearth, a dead tree. Nothing is explained. The central idea emerges from the way these glimpses pile up. This is a landscape being read for what has gone or is under threat, and the reader is left to feel that weight without being told to.
The poem has no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters. Its stanzas run from one line to three, like separate steps or separate breaths. The title's "(2)" hints at a sequence, though the poem works fine alone. Each fragment is as compressed as a haiku and stands on its own image, and the white space between them acts like the pause of someone stopping to look. The rhythm is irregular and close to speech, but the sounds are carefully chosen. "The forest pool's murky surface / stippled with bubbles" slows on the heavy vowels of "murky," then pops with the b's and p's of "stippled with bubbles." "Stippled" is a painter's word for a surface made of tiny dots, and it turns the pool into a drawing, though the bubbles also suggest something stirring or rotting underneath.
The mosquitoes show the poem's quiet craft best. They are rising "only as high as my knees," and this is the only moment the speaker appears, and only as a body, a unit of measurement. Then comes a line to itself: "still drying their wings." The detail is tender, even vulnerable, since these are insects newly hatched and not yet ready to fly. The next stanza is three words long, with no verb and no comfort: "West Nile virus." The poem never says that mosquitoes carry it. It simply sets the two side by side and lets the reader supply the link. The fragile creature and the threat turn out to be the same thing.
The next stanza begins with a participle that has no subject: "missing the heart-stopping / flush of a grouse." Who is missing? It might be the speaker, longing for the sound, or it might be the grouse itself, absent from the woods. The grammar allows both. "Flush" is the word for a bird bursting out of cover, and "heart-stopping" captures that sudden fright. The phrase is oddly affectionate. It is a small scare we want, set against the virus, a scare we don't. The poem does not claim the one caused the other, but placing them in sequence invites the thought.
The last two stanzas widen the view backward in time. A "charcoal hearth" is a site where wood was once burned to make charcoal, so the forest carries the traces of earlier human work, and the speaker reads them as casually as a footpath. Then comes the poem's strongest language: "the last butternut tree's / mossy corpse." "Last" is a word of finality, and "corpse" is the only moment where the tree is treated as something that lived and died. Yet moss is growing there, so the ending is not simply bleak. Decay is already being colonised by new life. The poem stops on that image rather than on a verdict.
Its significance lies in this restraint. Many poems about the environment make speeches, but this one offers a list of observations and trusts the reader to add them up: noise from the railway, a pool full of rising insects, disease, a vanished bird, an industrial past, a dead tree. Every detail is small and specific, and together they suggest a whole ecosystem in slow trouble. The absence of an obvious argument makes the poem harder to dismiss. A good question for any reader is what would be lost if the poem explained itself. The answer is probably the feeling of walking through the hollow and noticing, one thing at a time, how much is missing.