Milk is the first thing this poem offers and the first thing it quietly takes back. A spring house is a small building set over running water, a cool shed where dairy was once stored. The line break in "still keeping the milk- / snakes cool" lets us read "milk" as the thing being kept, until the hyphen turns it into a milk-snake. The old function survives ("still keeping"), but its occupants have changed. Milk snakes are harmless and, as folklore has it, named for a supposed taste for cows' milk. Even the name carries an old rural world with it, though the cows themselves are gone.
The second unit moves indoors and sideways in time: "the view from my childhood / bedroom window" is followed, after a gap, by the flat sentence "I live in it now." The pronoun is slippery. "It" could be the view, the bedroom, the house, or the whole remembered landscape. Judging by these lines, the speaker has come back to the place he grew up in, and the poem stays calm about how strange that is. The sentence gets a stanza to itself and no exclamation mark. Nothing in it is dramatic, and that restraint is what makes the sentence land.
The walnut sprout does the most with the least. "We tried to kill" it "with a frisbee": a child's game, a little cruelty, a plan that obviously failed. The next unit, "eating in its shade," jumps over the decades without a word. The white space between the two stanzas is the only clock the poem needs. The plural "we" hints at other people in that earlier life, and their absence from the shade is felt rather than stated. What was once a target is now a roof.
The last stanzas turn from memory to the present marsh. "Cattails / overwhelmed by tearthumb" is a small natural defeat: one plant smothered by another, a barbed vine, whose name sounds like a wound. Look at the poem's vocabulary and you notice how many compound nouns it uses, each made of two plain words: spring house, milk-snakes, cattails, tearthumb. The names fuse animals, body parts and ordinary objects, as if the place had been described by people who worked on the land. Then comes the line that breaks the pattern: "the purpose-driven life." It is a phrase most readers will recognise as the title of a bestselling religious self-help book, and here it has no punctuation and no explanation. It is hard to say whether it is a joke, a sigh or a serious question. One reasonable reading is that the tearthumb is the one living a purposeful life, spreading single-mindedly, while the human plans in the poem (kill the sprout, come home, settle in) have been overtaken by what grows regardless.
Formally, the poem is made of fragments. It has no rhyme, no capital letters and almost no punctuation, and the lines are short, often only a few syllables. Each unit is a small snapshot, separated from the next by space, like a compressed haiku sequence. The sounds do quiet work, though. "Still," "milk" and "kill" share an *-ill* note across different stanzas, and "cattails" and "tearthumb" both start with a hard *t*. The title, "The Hollow (19)," suggests this is one numbered piece in a longer run, which I take as an inference from the number. A hollow is a low valley, and it is also an empty space. Both senses fit a poem about a place that holds a life and is slightly emptied of what it once held.
The poem matters because it does not announce what coming home means. It lets a snake in a spring house, a window, a tree and a tangle of vines do the work. A reader finishes it knowing that time has passed, that things we tried to stop have grown anyway, and that a person can end up living inside a memory. The poem never says it is sad or comforting, and it is both.