Almost every noun in this poem is a name: wood nettles, foamflower, fisher, hollows. That is the clue to its subject, which is the gap between seeing something and being able to say what it is. The speaker glimpses a fisher, a long-bodied woodland mammal related to weasels, and in the "long moment / after it vanished" finds that the animal's name has slipped away too. What is left is a small, honest portrait of how attention works. Wonder arrives suddenly, and language catches up late.
The poem is built from short, unpunctuated fragments separated by white space, and the gaps work like blinks or held breaths. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. Instead the poem moves at the pace of someone walking and noticing. It begins with "wood nettles," a plant that stings, and moves straight to "that angry guy who hacked at them / with his hatchet." The consonants do the chopping: the hard *ck* and *tch* of "hacked" and "hatchet" are as jagged as the blade. The casual "that angry guy" suggests an anecdote the speaker half-remembers, and it brings a flash of human violence into a quiet scene.
Then comes the grammatical slide of "becoming the place / of my fisher sighting." It is unclear what is becoming what. The nettle patch, the man's tantrum, and the walker's memory all seem to melt into one spot. "Becoming" also carries a faint pun, since the place both turns into something new and suits its new role. The poem suggests that places are renamed by what we see in them. A spot once defined by anger is now defined by an animal, and the speaker's own life seems to enter the landscape here, with the first-person "my" appearing for the first time.
"Foamflower patch" stands alone on its line. After the hacked nettles, its soft, frothy name feels like an exhale, a cool pause before the animal appears and disappears. The poem never describes the fisher's vanishing directly, and the white space does that job instead. What follows is the poem's best joke: the speaker is "fishing for its name," and the animal is a *fisher*. The sounds make the link too, since "foamflower," "fishing," and "fisher" all share an *f*, and "fishing" and "vanished" share the *sh*. The reader can't tell whether "its" means the animal or the flower, and that doubt suits a mind that is grasping at several names at once. The name might be something the speaker only half knows, or something he knows perfectly well and cannot reach, which is the more familiar and more human failure.
The last two units open the poem outward. "Wilder hills / and deeper hollows" widens the view from one nettle patch to a whole landscape. The title's word, *hollow*, returns here, and the comparatives suggest an appetite for places more remote than this one. They could also describe the inner country the speaker has just been searching. After this sweep comes the final line, "the fisher's undulating gait," which at last supplies the name, just as the animal's movement is recalled. The long word "undulating" rolls on its liquid *l* and *n* sounds, so the line seems to ripple. This smoothness answers the jerky hatchet strokes at the start. Violence opens the poem, and fluid, effortless motion closes it.
Judging by the number in its title, this piece belongs to a numbered sequence, but it stands well alone. What makes it significant is how much it does with so little. Without preaching, it sets human anger beside animal grace, sharp plants beside soft ones, and the speed of seeing beside the slowness of naming. It also shows that a word retrieved from memory can bring the whole creature back, so that its gait becomes visible again in the final line. The poem ends not with an explanation but with the picture of that gait, and readers are left to follow the fisher into the deeper hollows.