A walk through woods rarely announces its argument, and Dave Bonta's "The Hollow (25)" doesn't try to. It moves from plant to plant the way an eye does when someone walks slowly and stops often. The number in the title suggests, though the poem doesn't confirm it, that this is one of a series about the same place, so we arrive in the middle of a long habit of looking. What the poem is really about is the gap between seeing a plant and knowing its name, and how a name can carry a surprising amount of baggage.
It opens mid-motion: "leaning / this way or that." There is no subject yet, so we don't know what is leaning until the goldenrod arrives. The hyphenated "forest-dwelling" is a small surprise, since many readers picture goldenrod in open fields. Then comes a correction, as if the speaker is revising himself aloud: "not a mere patch / but a stand." The word "stand" works in two ways. It is a term for a group of plants growing together, and it is also what upright things do, which answers the leaning of the first lines. The plants lean, yet they stand. In a few words the poem makes a modest claim for the dignity of what is easy to overlook.
The poem has no rhyme and almost no punctuation, and its rhythm is the rhythm of walking and stopping. Lines run from one word to five, and white space does the work of pauses. The plant names sit alone in their own stanzas, like labels in a field guide or things said aloud on the path: "the black cohosh," "naked-flowered tick trefoil." Much of the pleasure is in how they sound. "Black cohosh" is all hard stops and a hushed ending. The trefoil name is long and lumbering, and it takes a full line to say. Even a reader who has never seen these plants can enjoy them as sound before they become pictures.
The one stanza that describes rather than names is the most delicate: "fairy bells / berried / under their leaves." "Berried" turns a noun into a participle and gets a line to itself, so we slow down on it. It also echoes "bells," a soft b-sound linking flower and fruit. The detail rewards close attention, because the berries are tucked under the leaves, and you only see them if you stoop. The next name then lands with a slightly comic jolt. After plants that hide, "naked-flowered" sounds almost indecent, a reminder that botanical names were coined by people with their own habits of seeing.
The ending is where the poem turns. Its only quotation marks surround "leaflets three," which recalls the familiar folk warning about poison ivy. "Trefoil" itself means three-leaved, so the plant does match the rhyme. These marks bring in another voice, the cautious, inherited wisdom everyone half-remembers from childhood. The line break is well timed: "but only" hangs for a moment, and we expect a threat. What follows is a joke: "only the name itches." The plant isn't what's irritating. "Tick" and the three-leaf warning together make the skin crawl before anything has touched it. Judging by the poem's tone, the speaker is amused rather than alarmed, and he notices how language can make the body react to something that isn't there.
That is the central idea, and it explains why such a small poem is worth reading closely. Naming is how we hold a place in our heads, but names also bring in fear, habit and half-remembered rules, which can come between us and the living thing. The poem keeps both truths. It enjoys the names, lining them up with obvious relish, and it also admires what the names can't capture: the leaning, the standing, the berries under the leaves.
The poem makes no speech about nature, and its closing joke is dry and quiet. By being plain-spoken and a little funny, it shows a way of paying attention that doesn't need grand language. A walk in the woods, it suggests, is partly an act of reading, and a good reader notices when the words are doing more than the plants.