Dave Bonta's "The Hollow (18)" reads like an inventory taken while walking around a run-down place. There is a window with weeds against it, a chicken house, the remains of a childhood collection, a maple, a wall. Nothing is explained. The number in the title suggests the poem belongs to a longer sequence set in the same spot, but it needs no context to work. Its central idea arrives only in the last two lines: what survives of a place is not what simply endures, but what someone keeps choosing to repair.
The opening image is carefully strange. "Ghostly dock leaves / pressed against the window" gives us a common weed made pale and spectral, as if seen through glass. "Pressed" also carries a second meaning. It suggests flowers flattened in a book, nature turned into a keepsake, while also describing plants crowding a building the way time crowds a memory. The window is a barrier, and the poem keeps us on the near side of it. Then comes "old chicken house," a bare label with no verb, as though the speaker is naming things to see whether they still answer.
The poem's most unexpected moment is the rats. "Gone but for their grins" puts the pronoun before its noun, so we meet the grins first and only afterwards learn whose they are. The delay mimics the way a memory surfaces: a detail first, its owner later. "Mummified" is a grand, almost Egyptian word for something a child found in a shed, and that mismatch is both funny and touching. The "collection" was a children's way of handling death, collecting it, arranging it, grinning back at it. Now only the teeth survive, a joke that outlasts the bodies and carries a quiet grief.
Next comes the maple, "once my best / climbing teacher." Calling a tree a teacher is affectionate, and the line break after "best" lets that word stand briefly alone, like a child's superlative. Then the second half of the thought lands: "broken-limbed maple." The pun on limbs is hard to miss, since a tree that taught climbing is now injured in the way a climber might be. The sounds of "climbing" and "limbed" echo each other across the two lines, tying lesson and damage together. It is also worth noticing the pronouns. We begin with "our" collection, shared with someone else. Then it is "my" teacher, and by the end only "I" remains. The poem narrows from a shared childhood to a single person standing in the yard.
There is no rhyme and no punctuation, and every line is lowercase. The poem relies on fragments, and nearly all of them lack a main verb. Some stanzas are a single line, such as "old chicken house," "broken-limbed maple" and "stone wall," and they sit on the page like separate stones with gaps between them. That shape prepares us for the ending. After all the passive, ruined things, the last stanza gives us a person doing something: "all the times / I've rebuilt it." The sound of "wall" slides into "all," so the object turns into repeated labour. "I've rebuilt" is in the present perfect, a tense that reaches from the past into now, so the work is not finished.
The wall is also the only item in the poem not described as ghostly, gone, old or broken. It is not exempt from ruin, though, since the speaker has had to rebuild it many times. The poem suggests that a wall, and perhaps a memory, lasts only as long as someone keeps lifting the stones back. In that light the title's "hollow" works on two levels. It names a place, and it also names the emptiness left behind when rats, trees and buildings give way.
The poem's significance lies in this refusal of easy nostalgia. It lets decay be comic, as with the grins, and sad, as with the maple, without ever lamenting aloud. Its final gesture is practical rather than sentimental, and the quiet pride in "all the times" gives the whole poem its shape.