Nothing in these lines is hurried. Dave Bonta's "The Hollow (33)" is a run of observations set down one after another, as if a walker had stopped at each tree and jotted a note before moving on. The number in the title hints that this is one piece in a longer sequence of poems with the same name. That is only an inference from the title, but the poem does read like a page from a notebook rather than a self-contained speech. Even so, the notes add up to a quiet meditation on aging, damage, and the odd intimacy of things that grow side by side.
The first image is an "elderly beech" whose bark is "gathered in folds as if / it doesn't fit right." The simile turns bark into clothing, a coat that has stayed the same while its wearer shrank or sagged. The line break matters here. "As if" hangs at the end of its line, so we feel the hesitation before the flat, almost grumbling phrase "it doesn't fit right." The diction is plain and speech-like, and the poem never reaches for grand words to tell us a tree can look uncomfortable in its own skin.
The hemlock brings a sharper image: a "zigzag scar / in a hemlock trunk," followed by the fragment "its sealed lips." The scar becomes a mouth, closed over and silent. The zigzag shape might make a reader think of lightning, but the poem never names a cause, and that withholding gives "sealed lips" its weight. The tree has healed and keeps its story to itself. The sound supports this. The buzzing, doubled z of "zigzag" gives way to the hushed s and l of "sealed lips," like a sudden noise followed by quiet.
Then the tone swerves. "Graceful" sits alone on its line like a compliment, and what follows deflates it: "the arc of a tree's / mid-life crisis." The joke borrows a human idiom and applies it to wood. It also sets two kinds of change against each other. The zigzag is sudden and angular, the sort of change that happens to a tree. The arc is smooth and gradual, a bend that the tree seems to have chosen. Calling the bend "graceful" is both funny and tender, because it treats a crisis as something that can be carried with dignity.
The last stanza turns abstract and cool, almost like a surveyor's report: "the vanishing distance / between their two positions." "Their" has no clear antecedent, so the reader has to supply it. The final line does that for us, though it complicates things. "Oakhemlock" is one word, two tree names pressed together with no space. Since the poem has so far mentioned a beech and a hemlock, the oak is a new arrival. Judging by the earlier arc, we might picture an oak bending toward the hemlock until the gap between them nearly closes. The form acts out the idea: the space between the words has vanished just as the distance has.
That compression is typical of how the poem is built. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the poem has neither capital letters nor punctuation. Line lengths run from the single word "graceful" to the longer, loosely hung "bark gathered in folds as if." The lack of full stops makes the poem feel like continuing attention rather than a finished argument, and even the last word is left without a full stop, as if it were still growing.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it gets from so little. It gives trees bodies that fit badly, scars they don't discuss, moods that bend them off course, and a slow pull toward a neighbor. It does this without sentimentality, because the humor keeps the personification from turning solemn. We are invited to see ourselves in the trees, since we also wear bodies that change shape, carry old injuries quietly, and drift toward other people over time. The poem hands us the slowest event in the woods, two trunks converging over years, as a single word we can take in at a glance.