A tree stands beside its fallen twin, and the poem makes us wait to learn what kind of tree it is. The opening lines, "standing beside / its toppled twin," are a sentence without a subject. The next stanza supplies one, "cucumber magnolia," set alone on its own line like a specimen label. Two trees that began alike now have different fates, one upright and one on the ground, and the poem sets that quiet loss at the front of everything else.
From there it looks downward and backward. Beneath a white oak, "200-year old charcoal / crumbles from the bank." The numeral is the only digit in a poem otherwise made of plain nature words, so it stands out. The charcoal suggests a fire long ago, though the poem gives no reason for it and doesn't need to. It records only that two centuries of time can still be pulled out of a stream bank, and that it is falling apart as we watch. The verb "crumbles" is stressed by its sound, because hard *c* returns in "cucumber," "charcoal," "crumbles" and "club's," a dry, brittle clicking that makes the stanza feel like handling something breakable.
Then comes a riddle: "the bright red club's / rotten handle." Judging by the next stanza, the club is the fruiting spike of a jack-in-the-pulpit, and the handle is its stem, going soft with decay. The line break splits the possessive, so "club's" hangs at the end of one line while the "rotten handle" waits below it. The same stanza sets brightness against rot, and the poem keeps returning to that pairing. Only after this image does the poem give the plant's name, "jack-in-the-pulpit," again on a line by itself. Naming the thing last makes us see it first, as a walker might spot a red shape in the leaf litter and only then work out what it is.
The final stanzas turn playful. "jack or jill" borrows the nursery rhyme, but it also points to a real feature of the plant. Jack-in-the-pulpits are known to shift between male and female from one year to the next, depending partly on how much energy they have stored. Bonta lets that fact collide with human vocabulary: "transitioning to female / from the pulpit." The phrase can be read two ways. It describes the plant moving to the stage where it bears fruit, and it echoes how we now talk about gender. The word "pulpit" adds another layer, since a pulpit is where pronouncements get made. The plant leaves the place from which rules are announced, and the poem declines to preach in its place. It reports what the plant does and lets the reader feel the joke, the wonder and the quiet challenge to fixed categories.
The poem is built to carry this weight lightly. It has no rhyme, no capital letters, and no punctuation except one apostrophe. Lines are short, mostly two to four beats, and the stanzas vary from one line to three, so the pace stutters and pauses the way someone does when stopping to look. The lack of full stops lets the poem drift from tree to charcoal to berry to pun without any marked transition, as attention moves in a real walk. The title, "The Hollow (30)," suggests the poem belongs to a numbered series, and a hollow is both a small sheltered valley and an emptiness. The poem treats the first meaning as a place full of change.
What makes the poem significant is how much time it fits into so few words. A fallen tree, two-hundred-year-old charcoal, a stem rotting this season and a plant that may be a different sex next year are four different scales of change, and none is treated as more natural than another. Death and fertility sit side by side as well, the rotten handle next to the bright red club. The final joke is also the most serious thing in the poem, because the woods get to be the authority on what is fixed and what is fluid. The poem never raises its voice, in contrast to the pulpit it mentions.