Dave Bonta's «The Hollow (21)» reads like a page torn from a field notebook: a few things noticed on a walk through woods in autumn, set down with almost no commentary. The number in the title suggests one entry in a longer sequence, but the poem stands alone as a small study in how differently time passes for horses, trees and ferns.
It opens on "old corral," a human structure with no verb to hold it up, which fits. The next lines give its history in numbers: "two years for horses / 47 for trees." The phrasing is compressed, so I read it as the horses' tenancy lasting two years and the trees having had 47 to move in since. The poem never says so outright, and that restraint is part of its method. Notice, too, the mix of the spelled-out "two" and the numerals "47." The small figure looks as slight on the page as it was in the land's memory.
Then comes the poem's only flinch of personal feeling: "too red." It could describe the autumn colour, but the next lines complicate it: "half the maple's leaves / are poison ivy." The beauty is partly a trespass. The ivy has climbed the maple and dyed it in borrowed leaves, and "too red" works as both an aesthetic judgement and a warning. Even the colour of autumn here is the forest taking over.
The numbers then jump from two and 47 to "180 million autumns." The word "unchanged" stands alone at the end of a stanza, and its subject, "cinnamon ferns," doesn't arrive until after the white space. The reader has to wait across the gap, and the gap works like the time the poem is describing. Counting in autumns, not years, is a nice choice. It ties deep time to the very season of decay and colour change, so the ferns' constancy is set against the maple's showy, borrowed turning. The figure itself is the poem's claim, and I'd read it as a gesture at the ferns' ancient lineage, not a statistic to check.
The next image is the most inventive: "fraying scrolls / illuminated with blue fungi." Judging by the context, the scrolls are the ferns' fronds or something close to them, curled and ragged as autumn wears them down. The metaphor pulls in medieval manuscripts, with the fungi as the decorated capitals and painted margins. The metaphor does two things. It turns the forest floor into a library, with the ferns as an old text, and it quietly says that decay is a kind of artistry. The fraying is the illumination's price.
The poem closes on three heavy syllables: "black birch log." After the long, flowing "illuminated with blue fungi," the blunt monosyllables land like a dropped weight, and the b of "black" and "birch" gives the line a dull knock. It has no verb and no comment, only an object. We began with a made thing, the corral, and end with a fallen one, a log. Between them the poem has moved from human time to tree time to fern time, and then back down to the ground where everything ends up.
Formally there is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are short, the stanzas are one or two lines long, and almost every line is a noun phrase or fragment. Only "are" gets a full verb, which gives the poem its hushed, looking-not-explaining tone. It has the compression of a haiku without counting syllables, and the white space does the work of connecting. We are left to link horses to ivy to ferns to log ourselves.
What makes the poem worth reading is its humility. It never lectures about nature reclaiming human work, though that is plainly what it shows. It lets three numbers do the arguing, and in doing so it shifts our sense of scale. A corral that mattered to someone is one footnote in a story that the ferns have been quietly telling for far longer than any of us.