Fear has changed shape in this poem. It begins with a cousin in a bear costume of nothing but growl and swagger, and ends with a speaker who can't bring himself to look at the treetops. Dave Bonta's "The Hollow (32)" is a memory of a wooded place that slides, in its last few lines, into worry about what is happening to it now. The number in the title suggests one entry in a longer sequence, but the poem stands well enough alone.
The opening is almost comic. A cousin who "once / impersonated a bear" belongs to family lore, the kind of story retold at gatherings. The next line, "tall tree tales", works as a pun, since tall tales and tall trees share a sound and a habit of exaggeration. The woods are being remembered through stories as much as through sight. Even the bear is a performance, which makes the danger safe and affectionate.
The owl comes next. "Just there" is a small, physical gesture, as if the speaker were pointing at an empty branch. Then comes the tense: the "barred owl used to blink / at the rare car." The verb is a lovely choice. The owl is not startled or hunting, just mildly, sleepily unimpressed by the human world passing beneath it. But "used to" quietly says that the owl no longer does this. The poem never says why, and the reader is left to feel the absence.
Then the light dims: "dim hemlocked light." Turning "hemlock" into a describing word is a neat move, because the trees seem to shape the air itself. The light is not just filtered through branches; it is *hemlocked*, possessed by the trees. The word "hemlock" returns twice more, which makes it the poem's anchor. Its repetition acts like a drumbeat, the way you might keep touching a tree trunk as you walk past.
The second memory is a darker version of the first. The bear was a cousin's joke, but now there is "a bobcat's hiss," recalled with "childish fear." The sibilance of "childish" and "hiss" lets the reader hear the sound. This is the poem's one real moment of fright, and it is safely in the past. The adult speaker can look back at it almost fondly, as an old thrill the woods once provided.
The turn comes with "hemlock refuge / threatened by needle eaters." Two things shift at once. The tense moves into the present, and the danger moves from something large and visible to something small and unnamed. The poem never says what the "needle eaters" are, though the phrase suggests pests feeding on the trees' foliage. Leaving them unnamed is effective. The compound has the plain, almost nursery-rhyme sound of a creature from a children's story, yet it describes a threat no one can scare away by growling. A bear can be impersonated and a bobcat can hiss and leave, but this enemy simply eats.
The final line, "I avoid looking up," quietly reverses the poem. Earlier, looking up was how you found the owl, the tall trees, the tall tales. Now the speaker refuses the gesture, presumably because the canopy would show damage he would rather not see. A single, flat sentence ends the poem, with no comfort offered and no description of what he is avoiding. The restraint makes the avoidance feel real, and the silence after the line carries the grief.
Formally the poem is free verse without rhyme, built from short fragments in tiny stanzas. The line lengths loosely echo haiku counts in places, such as "dim hemlocked light" and "at a bobcat's hiss," but the poem doesn't hold to a strict pattern. The gaps between stanzas matter as much as the words, working like pauses in someone's speech as they stop to remember.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much loss it fits into so few words. It shows that what we fear changes as we grow up, from animals we could meet to damage we can only watch happen. It also suggests that we sometimes protect ourselves from that damage by looking away.