Dave Bonta's "The Hollow (11)" begins with almost nothing: "water standing / in a raccoon footprint." The image is tiny and exact, a puddle the size of a palm, and it records an animal that has come and gone. The numeral in the title suggests the poem belongs to a series of poems about one place, though the text alone doesn't say more. From that footprint the poem widens out, to a stream named "Plummer's Hollow Run," then to a "deer fence," then to a whole patch of land. It reads like a walk, and the reader is taken along one fragment at a time.
The subject is what happens when a place is left alone. Inside the fence, "a sudden understory / of shrubs and forbs" has appeared. The word "sudden" is a nice trick, because what the poem describes took "nearly two decades." The slow change reaches the walker as a surprise: one step brings you from open ground to thick growth. The poem never says that deer, left to graze, keep the woods bare, and it never needs to. The fence does the arguing, and the vegetation is the evidence.
The construction matches this restraint. There is no rhyme and almost no punctuation. The lines are short, some only a word or two, and the poem is set out in small islands of white space. "Deer fence" stands alone as a line, as blunt as a sign nailed to a post. The opening phrase "water standing" sets stillness against the moving "Run" a line later. Even the sounds seem to thicken as the poem goes on. "Shrubs and forbs" packs its consonants together like the plants themselves, and "sudden understory" slides through soft s and d sounds before the hard stop of "plot."
That word "plot" is the poem's best joke. A plot is a patch of ground, but "this plot thickens" is also the stock phrase for a story growing more complicated. Here the phrase is literal, because the undergrowth really is getting denser, and the pun also announces that the poem is turning from description toward narrative. "Smilax" comes next, set on its own line like the fence. It is the name of a thorny, climbing vine, and the poem treats it as a character: "they say her thorniness drove a man / wildflowery."
The ending is the most daring part. "They say" sounds like folklore or gossip, and "her thorniness" turns the plant into a woman. The Latin name Smilax does also turn up in old Greek myth, in a story about a man changed into a flower. If that is in the poet's mind, "wildflowery" becomes a quiet metamorphosis. That is an inference, though, and the poem doesn't confirm it. What the word does on the page is clearer. "Drove a man wild" is the expected phrase, but the poem swerves into "wildflowery," a coined word that combines "wild," "flowery" and "wildflower." Grammar gives way to growth, and the sentence ends without a full stop, as if it were overrun like the fenced plot. "Flowery" also carries a second sense of ornate or over-decorated language, so the poem may be gently mocking its own gesture toward myth.
This is why the poem matters. It has the patience of field notes, with its footprint, its stream, its measured years and its botanical vocabulary, and it also has the playfulness of someone who loves words as much as plants. Nothing is declared, and the meaning comes from the order of the observations. The raccoon passes through briefly and leaves water behind. The deer are shut out and the land answers with an abundance of green. The poem suggests that protection and absence can be as creative as action, and that a thorny, tangled place can be a kind of story.
The poem also leaves a lot to the reader. Is the "man" a gardener, a botanist, a character from legend? Does "from here" mark a view or a beginning? The poem refuses to say, so the meaning grows slowly and without a fixed path, much as the plants do.