Dave Bonta's "The Hollow (43)" reads like a set of notes taken while walking through a wooded valley. The speaker looks closely at the ground and trees and lets small details tell the story. The opening lines admit that the place could be "200 years old / or ten thousand," so its age can't really be known. It was once a road or a streambed, and the poem leaves that uncertainty hanging.
The images that follow are quietly vivid. A rhododendron is stripped bare as high as a hungry deer can reach, which suggests the animals' hunger without stating it. Height is measured not in feet but by how many unripe spikenard berries you find, a playful, intimate way of knowing a place. The poem ends with trees whose trunks curve "to keep their balance" on a slowly sliding slope.
The mood is calm, attentive, and a little humbled. The speaker seems less interested in explaining the hollow than in noticing how everything in it adapts to time, hunger, and gravity.