A gate that closes itself is a strange thing to meet in the woods, and Dave Bonta begins "The Hollow (12)" with one, standing among oaks that are two hundred years old. The gate gets only a moment. Its "rusty note" has a stanza to itself, a single line, so the creak seems to hang in the air for a beat. Then the next stanza buries it: "smothered in leaf duff." The syntax is deliberately slippery. The smothered thing could be the gate's creak, or it could be the violet's "alter ego" that follows. Either way, the poem opens by muffling things, and it goes on to be about what stays unheard, unseen and unnoticed.
The violet is the poem's quiet botanical puzzle. "Self-fertilized alter ego" fits what violets are known to do: besides the showy blossoms, they can produce hidden flowers that never open and pollinate themselves close to the ground. The poem doesn't explain this, and it doesn't need to. What matters is the echo between "self-closing" and "self-fertilized." A gate that shuts without a hand and a flower that reproduces without a visitor are both small, closed circuits that need no audience.
Then comes the poem's only human sound, a sigh: "ah to be / both dapper and invisible." "Dapper" is a wonderfully fussy, slightly old-fashioned word, and putting it beside "invisible" is funny. The speaker wants to be well turned out and unseen at once, which is a wish no person could really satisfy. The answer arrives on the next line, as a bare label: "striped wintergreen." Judging by the name, this is a low woodland plant with striped leaves, and it is easy to read the stripes as pinstripes. The plant has what the speaker wants, looking sharp on the forest floor with nobody watching.
Next comes "ignored by / a pileated woodpecker." The bird is large and loud, the least invisible creature in the woods, and the wintergreen is beneath its notice. The line break helps: "ignored by" dangles for a moment before the bird arrives, so the reader feels the ignoring happen. The final stanza, "the dust from her drill," gives the bird a gender, which makes her an individual rather than a type. It also returns to smothering. Sawdust sifts down much as leaf duff piled up earlier, so even the overlooked plant may end up quietly covered. The poem leaves open whether that is a cost of invisibility or just how the forest works.
The form carries the theme. There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The lines run from two or three syllables to six, and they carry no capital letters and almost no punctuation. The hard consonants of "duff," "dapper," "drill" and "dust" give the poem a muted, thudding undertone, like a woodpecker heard through a thick wall of trees. Most striking is that the poem has no finite verb. It is built from noun phrases and passive participles ("smothered," "ignored") plus one wistful infinitive. Nothing in it acts. Things simply are, or have things done to them, which is the condition of the gate, the violet and the wintergreen.
The "(12)" in the title suggests that this is one piece in a longer sequence, though the poem itself gives no further information. Taken alone, it still works as a compact lesson in attention. It argues by placing images side by side rather than by stating a moral. Its small pleasure is that the poet notices what the woodpecker ignores, so the poem becomes the audience the hidden things never asked for. The attention it pays is a little like the violet's secret flower, modest and private, and complete in itself.