Dave Bonta's "The Hollow (13)" is a short walk through a patch of woods, told almost entirely in names. Rattlesnake plantain, lady's-slipper, blue-headed vireo and corpse plants are set down one after another, and a whole growing season comes with them. The poem begins with leaves pushing up and ends with pale, leafless stalks. Between those points it suggests that life, desire and death are one process seen at different moments. The numeral in the title suggests the poem belongs to a longer sequence, but it stands well on its own.
The first lines set up the poem's habit of double meaning. "Downy rattlesnake / plantain leaves" is a plant's common name broken across a line, so the word "rattlesnake" arrives alone before "plantain" explains it. Then comes "always a start." A start is a beginning, and it is also the jolt you feel when you nearly step on a snake. The line works as a comment on spring and as a small shock in the body, and the poem never chooses between them. The next image keeps up the sense of effort. Something is "still twisted / from its rush to leaf out." Growth looks hurried and a little painful here, as though the plant is still contorted from the speed of its own emergence. The poem is ambiguous about whether this refers to the plantain or to the "lady's-slipper orchid" that follows, and the vagueness helps. Spring seems to be one general rush.
The middle of the poem turns from sight to sound. The vireo's name is written out and then repeated across a wide gap: "vireo vireo." The spacing makes us hear the bird's song, with its pauses, and it also makes us look at the page as a stretch of quiet woods. Then the poem makes its boldest move: the call "sounds blue now." The bird's name has a color in it, and the poem lets the color seep into the sound. "Blue" also carries a mood, and "now" implies that something has shifted since the opening. The song that might have sounded bright at the start of the season sounds different as the season turns.
The shift becomes clear in the last stanza. "Pale pipes scorched / and straightened by sex" is the strangest and most forceful image. The "pipes" and the "corpse plants" of the final line seem to be the same plant, one of those ghostly white woodland flowers that have no green leaves at all. Judging by the verbs, the poem sees them stiffening and darkening after pollination. The word "sex" is blunt in a poem otherwise made of delicate botanical terms, and it gives the stanza a jolt. Reproduction is shown as something violent, a burning and a forced straightening, and it leads straight to death. The poem ends on "corpse plants" with no verb and no softening. The first plant rushed to leaf out, while these never leaf at all.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, and the lines are short fragments. Almost nothing in the poem is a complete sentence. The few verbs are participles like "twisted," "scorched" and "straightened," which describe things that have already been acted upon. Sound still matters, though. The hard *p* in "pale pipes" snaps like a stem, and the hissing run of "scorched and straightened by sex" feels like heat. The gaps between stanzas work as pauses in a walk, with each new plant a fresh stop.
Part of the poem's significance is its trust in names. Words like "rattlesnake plantain," "lady's-slipper" and "corpse plants" already carry menace, comedy, elegance and death, so the poet barely has to comment. The poem's compression is similar to haiku, though it is looser in shape, and what it leaves out does much of the work. Readers are asked to notice what the speaker notices. The poem's finding is that spring contains its own ending, and a walk in the woods is enough to show it.