Winter has taken the insects, and Dave Bonta's «Antennae» shows what a mind does with the loss: it turns the bare woods into a new kind of insect. The opening is a fragment with no main verb, "Seeing the almost bare trees as antennae", so it reads like a jotted note, a perception caught as it happens. The branches become "intelligence-gathering stations for an alien umwelt." The phrase is deliberately clunky and technical. "Umwelt" names the world as one particular creature senses it, so the trees are imagined tuning in to a reality we cannot share. Then the register flips within the same sentence: "the rococo feelers of moths." Rococo means frilled and ornate, and the phrase turns fine twigs against the sky into feathery moth antennae. Military surveillance and decorative flourish collide, and the collision is both funny and exact, because a web of twigs really does look like ornament and like equipment for listening.
The poem alternates prose and short verse, in the manner of haibun, and the haiku do not keep strictly to a 5-7-5 count. "lonesome hollow" has only four syllables, and the line "speaking softly so the void" stretches to seven. They keep the feel of short-long-short without the rigidity. In the first haiku the speaker stops observing the trees and starts behaving like them. "Hollow" can mean a sheltered valley or simply an empty space, and that slide carries us into "the void." The line "speaking softly so" is full of soft s-sounds, so the hush is audible. The haiku ends on "reply", the one thing the poem withholds. It is a nervous joke, but also a real feeling: out in an emptied landscape, a person might half-want, half-fear an answer.
The second prose block turns plainly personal: "What I miss most of all in the colder months." The list begins with the b-b chime of "beetles and butterflies," moves to "crickets at night," and then surprises us with "those delicate ninjas the ichneumon wasps." The scientific name, the affectionate "those" and the slangy "ninjas" sit together comfortably. They also continue the spy-and-stealth thread from "intelligence-gathering." The final sentence is another fragment, "The way they tap the ground with paired canes, sniffing, listening," and it quietly closes a loop. Antennae are now canes, the tools of someone feeling a way forward. The verbs, tapping, sniffing, listening, show how one organ works as touch, smell and hearing together, which is exactly what the trees were imagined to be doing at the start.
That image of the cane sets up the last haiku: "unmarked path / a stick leaning on a tree / for the next hiker." A walking stick is a human antenna, a way of testing the ground ahead. By now the speaker is no longer only watching insects or imagining trees as sensors. He is a creature feeling along an unmarked way. The poem doesn't say whether he found the stick or set it there, and the ambiguity helps, because either way the gesture is the same: a tool passed on to a stranger. This answers the first haiku. There the void was asked not to reply, but here a kind of reply arrives across time, from someone you will never meet.
The poem is significant for how much it does without rhyme, ornament or an announced moral. It never states that humans, trees and insects are alike. It builds the likeness from one linked chain of images: antenna, cane, stick. Many nature poems are about looking, but this one is about listening, and about the humility of finding your way by touch when the paths are unmarked and the season has gone quiet. The tone stays light, with its ninjas and nervous whispering, which keeps the idea from turning solemn. A reader finishes the poem seeing winter branches differently, as a network still sensing the world even when its insects have gone.