Almost nothing happens in this poem until its last two lines, and that is the point. For most of its length it is a walker's inventory: gravel, stone, thin soil, empty cellars, a gate. Then a hand reaches out and the landscape answers. The poem is about how much a place holds in reserve, and how a small, deliberate act of touch can wake it.
The construction is spare. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The stanzas shrink and swell: three lines, then the single word "riprap," then two lines, three more, then the two-word "locked gate," and finally two lines to close. The one-word and two-word stanzas work like stepping stones, forcing the reader to stop and look. Syntax is stripped back as well. Apart from "empties" and the closing "stroking" and "burst," the poem has almost no active verbs. It is built from noun phrases, as if the speaker were pointing rather than explaining. The numeral in the title suggests one entry in a longer sequence of poems about the same place, and the poem's habit of noticing without commentary fits that kind of repeated visit.
The opening plays a quiet trick with scale. "At the bottom of the mountain / a small mountain / of gravel" repeats the word "mountain" and shrinks it, so that a heap of crushed stone becomes a miniature of the real thing. "Riprap" then lands with a hard, percussive sound. It is a builder's word for loose stone used to shore up a slope, so the first hint of human presence is a tool for holding the land in place. Against that comes the softness of "just enough soil / for anise root." The phrase "just enough" is the poem's most generous moment: life asks for very little here. The plant's name brings in a suggestion of scent, a sensory note in an otherwise dry, mineral scene.
The middle of the poem turns to sound, or to its absence. The hollow "empties / its silence into the gap," a striking image in which silence becomes a liquid poured downhill like a stream. Hollow and gap are both words for dips and openings in the land, and the poem lets them pour into one another. The next line, "old cellar holes," quietly adds history. Judging by the imagery, people once lived here, and all that remains of their houses is a set of dug-out hollows, so the landscape's emptiness has a human echo. "Locked gate" follows with a flat, blunt finality. It suggests ownership or restriction, a human claim laid over a place that has mostly outlived its occupants.
Then comes the turn. "Stroking the touch-me-nots / so they burst." The plant's name is both a botanical label and a command, and the poem both obeys it and defies it. The gate says no, the plants say "touch me not," and the speaker touches anyway, gently, with a verb that is closer to a caress than a grab. The result is the poem's only real event. The sound of "burst" is abrupt after so many soft, falling phrases, and it ends the poem on a single stressed syllable, like a small snap in the quiet. Because the speaker is never named and no "I" appears, the act feels almost impersonal, as though the place were simply responding to attention.
The poem's significance lies in this pairing of restraint and release. It does not lament the abandoned cellars or protest the gate. It lets them sit in the same field of vision as the anise root and the seedpods, and it suggests that the land goes on regardless of who owns or has left it. The touch that makes the pods burst also scatters their seeds, so the speaker's small gesture takes part in the place's renewal. It is a modest ending, but it turns a catalogue of stone and silence into a moment of contact, and it leaves the reader with the sense that paying close attention to a place is itself a way of belonging to it.