A walk through woods turns, in a few dozen words, into a descent through hundreds of millions of years. Dave Bonta's "The Hollow (10)" begins with things a hiker might notice in passing: birch roots, a rotted stump, a worn path, a rock. By the last two lines the ground has become the floor of a vanished ocean. The poem's central idea is that the ordinary landscape is full of absence and old time, and that you only have to look closely to see it.
The opening image is a small puzzle. "Birch roots / turned stilts" shows a tree standing on its own exposed roots, as if it had risen up on legs. Judging by the image, whatever once held the roots has decayed or washed away. The next line makes this explicit: "a hollow in the shape of a stump." The sentence has a neat paradox in it, since the empty space keeps the outline of what used to fill it. Absence here has a shape and almost a presence. The title plays on the same idea. A hollow is a small valley in the woods, and it is also simply an emptiness, and the poem lets both meanings work together. The number in the title also suggests this is one piece in a longer sequence, though the poem itself doesn't say so.
The middle section turns from trees to movement. "Desire path" stands alone on its line, and the isolation lets the phrase ring. The term describes a track worn by walkers who ignore the official route. The poem then shows an example: "deer cutting across / this trench of a trail." The sounds of "trench" and "trail" echo each other, and "trench" makes the human path sound deeply gouged, almost like a wound. The deer slice across it without caring, following their own wants. Even in a poem with no people in it, there is a quiet contrast between a made route and a chosen one.
Then comes the poem's richest image: "raised high in a claw / of upturned roots / an ordinary rock." The uprooted tree becomes a hand, and the rock becomes something held up like an offering or a trophy. The word "ordinary" is slightly teasing, because the next lines overturn it. "Smooth sandstone" is a short, soft-sounding phrase, with the repeated *s* and the rounded *m* and *n* feeling like a thumb passing over the surface. Then the poem makes its big leap: "the empty seas of the first / great extinction." Sandstone is made of compacted sand, so the rock can be read as a memory of water and shoreline. The poem asks us to imagine that water at a time when its life was being wiped out. The adjective "empty" is the key. It rhymes in meaning with "hollow," so the small gap where a stump used to be expands into an emptied ocean. The poem's one idea, that absence is a kind of shape, is carried from the forest floor to the planet.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no punctuation at all, so nothing closes the poem down. Most of the lines are tiny fragments, and many have no main verb. The few verb forms are participles, such as "turned," "cutting," "raised" and "upturned," which leave actions suspended mid-motion. The stanzas are separated by white space, and it feels like a walker stopping to look, then moving on. The longest line, "a hollow in the shape of a stump," slows the reading just where the central paradox appears. The last stanza is also the weightiest, with its long, open phrase running over two lines. It seems to stop only because the poem runs out of room, not because the thought is finished.
The poem also never says "I." No observer is named, which suits a poem about emptiness. The reader stands in the missing person's place, notices what is there and what has gone, and follows the claw of roots down to the rock. That is the poem's quiet achievement: it makes a few observed details feel connected to an unimaginably large span of time without ever raising its voice. The ending doesn't explain the feeling. It leaves a rock, a sea and a gap, and trusts the reader to feel their size.