Something big has gone from the woods, and the poem's first observation is how quickly the gap gets used. "Spicebush fills / the opening the big birch left." The speaker never says how the birch went, whether it fell or was cut. The poem cares about what comes after. Nothing is allowed to stay empty, and the rest of the poem tests that idea against human attempts to fence the land in and keep things separate. Natural life, it suggests, treats boundaries as suggestions. The numeral in the title suggests this is one piece in a longer series, but it stands comfortably alone.
The poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular beat, so its music comes from sound and spacing. The first line break leaves "fills" hanging, and then "left" closes the second line on a double meaning: the birch *left* a space, but it also simply *left*. The fullness and the absence arrive together. The sounds are tactile. The plosive b's of "big birch" give way to the hissing s's of "that allspice scent," which is a stanza of one line and almost no information, just a smell. Bonta lets the reader stand still and breathe it in. Because the poem withholds any comment, the stanza breaks do much of the thinking, and the silences between fragments feel like pauses on a walk.
Then comes the poem's strangest move. In quotation marks, in the middle of a woodland scene, sits "heteromorphic / self-incompatibility." It is jargon, presumably lifted from a botanical source, and it jars like a stranger's voice. The term describes plants whose flowers come in different forms and cannot fertilize themselves or each other within the same type. Partridgeberry, the next plant named, is the kind of plant the phrase seems to point to. Its berries become "red pills," a lovely small metaphor that makes the forest floor a pharmacy. The words "self-incompatibility" also carry a faint human joke, since a plant that cannot pair with itself has been built to need others. The woods, in this reading, run on difference and exchange, not on sealed-off units.
That reading sets up the sharpest turn. In capitals, without comment, we get "END OF PUBLIC ACCESS," the voice of a sign. Everything before was soft and lowercase, and this is blunt officialdom. Yet the next stanza undercuts it: "sun shining right through / the plastic sign." The sign is flimsy, translucent, and the light treats it as nothing. The word "right" does quiet work here, as the sun passes straight through the prohibition with no effort at all. The plants have barriers that are meaningful and productive, because they force exchange. The human barrier is cheap plastic and blocks nothing that matters to the light, the plants or the water.
The last stanza moves to the point where "the road crosses the creek," a meeting of human route and natural one, and the poem gives the last word to a crayfish "walking upstream." The verb is wonderfully plain and slightly comic. The crayfish goes against the current, deliberately, over a crossing where cars presumably go the other way. The line breaks make it a slow procession, with "a crayfish" alone on its line as if spotlit. There is no full stop. The poem ends on "upstream," a direction, so the walk seems to continue after the words stop.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. Its compression and its juxtaposition of images, with the argument left unspoken, recall haiku, but the fragments come from three registers: sensory, scientific and bureaucratic. Bonta sets them side by side and lets the reader feel the clash. The poem doesn't lecture about land ownership or ecology. It just shows that the birch's gap is filled, the sun is through the sign and the crayfish has gone ahead of us, and that is argument enough.