Paint is the first thing we meet: "glossy orange / to mark the hatchet-cut scars." Two kinds of human mark sit together here, the bright paint and the wounds beneath it. Judging by the imagery, the speaker is walking a boundary where someone has blazed the trees to say where one person's land ends and another's begins. The poem follows that walk through a woodland, and its central idea gradually emerges. Human claims on land, whether ownership, rules or good intentions, are thin and a little awkward against a forest that keeps growing, flowering and being eaten on its own terms. The most valuable thing in the poem turns out to be something nobody can own.
The construction is spare. There is no rhyme, no punctuation apart from the quotation marks, and no capital letters. Eight fragments are separated by white space, alternating loosely between two-line units and single lines. The single lines ("property line," "chestnut oak seedling," "black locust grove") work like captions in a field guide or entries in a surveyor's notebook, simply naming what is there. They also work as hinges. "property line" can be read as a label for the orange paint above it, or as the start of the next fragment, where "beyond the line trees" may mean trees that stand on the boundary, or "beyond the line, trees." The poem doesn't settle this, and the doubt suits its subject. The line is obvious on the tree and invisible in the view, which is "the same old view" on both sides.
That flat phrase matters. Crossing the border changes nothing the eye can see, and the poem moves on to something that grows without regard for boundaries, a chestnut oak seedling. It is a single line with no commentary, a small hope placed at the level of the speaker's knees.
Then comes the poem's most pointed moment, "leave no trace," in quotation marks. It is a borrowed voice, the slogan of a certain kind of walker, and its three short, level words sound like a sign at a trailhead. The poem lets it stand alone for a full stanza, and the next lines undercut it quietly: "only my footprints now / where spring beauties bloomed." The hatchet scars were traces, the paint is a trace, and now the speaker's own steps are too. "Only" can sound modest or sheepish. "Bloomed" is past tense, and spring beauties are early spring wildflowers that flower briefly, so the flowers may simply have finished for the year. They may also have been trodden down. The poem doesn't say, and that restraint keeps it honest. The speaker doesn't scold anyone, himself included, and leaves the doubt in place.
The ending lifts the eye. After bark, seedling and ground, the last fragment goes up into the canopy: "the leaf miners have laid bare / a rich vein of sky." Leaf miners are insect larvae that tunnel inside leaves, and the verb phrase turns them into prospectors. The word "vein" does double duty, as a vein of ore and as the vein of a leaf, and "rich" brings the language of property and wealth back into a poem that began with ownership. Here the damage is the discovery. The insects eat holes in a locust's foliage, and through those holes the sky shows. The long, open vowels of "laid bare" and "vein of sky" slow the line, and the poem stops on "sky," a word with no fence around it.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it argues without arguing. It never states an opinion about land use, conservation or ownership. It sets orange paint against a seedling, a slogan against a footprint, and a boundary against a hole in a leaf, and it lets the reader do the adding up. It also shows how much a few words can carry. The title, "The Hollow (3)", suggests one piece in a longer sequence, though the poem is complete without that context. A hollow is also an empty space, and by the end the emptiness has been filled with light.