Most of this poem is left unsaid, and that is how it makes its point. Dave Bonta gives us a walk through a wooded hollow as a series of glimpses: a gap in the canopy, a vine, a plant, a fruit, a patch of lichen. The poem names what is there and then stops, and its central idea sits in the final line, "its complex inner life." Whatever we can see in a woodland, the poem suggests, is only the surface of something much more intricate.
The title adds to this. "Hollow" can mean a small valley and also an empty space, and the poem plays on both meanings. The number in brackets hints that this is one piece in a sequence, though the poem works fine alone.
The construction is the most striking thing. Almost nothing here is a full sentence. The opening, "that gap between / crowns of adjacent trees / and what goes on underground," is a noun phrase with no main verb, and the small "that" makes it sound as if someone is pointing. The first line also ends on "between," so the word hangs over the line break. Then come single-line stanzas, "fox grape" and "Solomon's seal," each isolated in white space. They read like labels in a field guide, or like a walker stopping to name what they pass. The white space acts like the gaps between the treetops. We are shown separate things, and the connections between them are left for us to feel.
The poem moves through scale and direction. It begins high up among the tree crowns, drops to "underground," then rises again with "just one fling / on the way up." That line is ambiguous in a useful way. "Fling" suggests a brief love affair, and it also suggests a throw. With the fox grape named just below, I read it as a vine hurling itself upward, though the poem never says so. After that, the eye comes down to a leaf, a fruit and finally a rock. The last subject is the smallest and least showy.
The sound of the poem follows its subjects. There is no rhyme and no regular beat, only short, uneven lines. But the echoes are careful. "Crowns" and "underground" share a vowel sound that links the top of the forest to its roots. "Withered leaves curl around" is soft and loose, with its w, l and r sounds, and the leaves seem to curl as we say it. Then the sentence lands on "glossy black drupe," where three stressed words in a row slow us down. A drupe is a fruit with a hard stone at its centre, so even this image holds a hidden core, which anticipates the "inner life" of the last line. The contrast of "withered" against "glossy" also puts decay and ripeness in the same frame, and the leaves seem to cup the fruit like a hand.
The hard k sounds in "crustose lichen on a rock" make the line feel crusty and tight against the stone, and the k returns in "complex," the last stressed word of the poem. "Crustose" describes lichen that grows flat against its surface like a skin. That makes the final line quietly surprising. The lichen looks like the most inert thing in the poem, a stain on a rock. Yet it is the one creature the poem credits with an "inner life," and lichens really are partnerships between different organisms. Whether Bonta had that in mind I can't say, but the idea fits the poem.
It is also worth noticing what the poem refuses to do. It offers no feeling, no moral and no "I." The only abstract phrase, "complex inner life," arrives at the end, and it describes the lichen rather than the speaker. The speaker barely appears, and the attention is the human element. In that, the poem's compression is a little like haiku, though I would not push the comparison far.
The poem matters because it turns looking closely into a way of thinking. Gaps, in the canopy and on the page, stop being emptiness and become the places where relationships happen, above and below ground. A reader who finishes it may look at a rock, a vine or a gap between two trees a little longer than before.