A tree in the season of fallen leaves is an odd place to begin a meditation on presence, and that is the point of Dave Bonta's «Presence». The opening sentence sets up a cliché, the tree as "the very embodiment of presence", and then undercuts it. With the leaves down, the tree is "mostly absent, at least aboveground." The poem's central idea grows from that small paradox: presence and absence are not opposites, and the most convincing way of being present may be to go unnoticed.
The poem is a mix of prose and short three-line verses, in the manner of haibun, and each form does a different job. The prose reasons, and the verses show. The prose is plain and conversational, built from short declaratives. Its sharpest moment is a comparison that is almost comic: the tree is "real in the same way that a life-size cardboard cutout of a politician is real." The cutout is there, solid and upright, but empty, so "you can project anything onto it." The word "project" works two ways, as a screen for images and as a human habit of loading meaning onto things. The tree becomes "another blank space on your mental map," and the sentence is deliberately deflating. The pronoun "you" also matters here, because it puts the reader in the position of the projector.
The first verse is a small puzzle. "sleeping it off / on a park bench" sounds like a person recovering from a night out, and only the last line, "fallen leaves," reveals the real sleepers. The delay is the trick. The leaves are briefly human, even a little shabby, and the idea of falling takes on a faint social edge. The bench is wooden, so the dead leaves lie on something that was once a tree. The image makes the abstract point concrete: what is left of the tree's presence is scattered, borrowed and easy to mistake for something else.
The second prose paragraph turns the lens on the speaker. Here the poem quotes Denise Levertov's "Come Into Animal Presence" and describes her as celebrating "the rare privilege of being ignored by wild animals." Bonta's examples are ordinary and exact: a doe that "barely stepped aside," a beaver going "about its business fifty feet away," turkeys that "walk right past," small creatures foraging "all around me in the night woods." The verbs are casual, almost domestic. None of the animals reacts to the speaker, and that indifference is the gift. Where the tree is a blank onto which humans project, the speaker has become a blank that animals do not bother to project onto at all.
The closing phrase, "fade into the woodwork," is an idiom that normally describes someone embarrassed or overlooked. In a forest it becomes almost literal, since the speaker has joined the wood. The tone matters too. The speaker says, "I'm not sure what I've done to deserve it, but I'm humbled and grateful." There is no triumph or claim to mastery, only modest surprise. Real presence in this poem is a kind of self-effacement.
The final verse pulls the two halves together. "hole / between the stars / flying squirrel" begins with a single abrupt word, and the reader has to hang on through the line break until the animal appears. The image suggests a dark shape gliding across a night sky, noticed only because it blocks the stars. The squirrel is seen as an absence, a gap, which echoes the tree that is present mostly as something missing. Judging by the imagery, "hole" may also hint at the hollows where such creatures live, though the poem does not say so. The verses use no rhyme and no strict syllable count (the first has roughly four, four and three syllables), and that looseness suits a poem about not drawing attention to oneself.
The poem is significant for how much it does quietly. Within a few lines it takes a familiar symbol, questions it, and turns it into a different kind of attention: seeing the world by getting out of its way. It does not preach about nature, and its argument comes through a cardboard politician, a bench of leaves and a gap among the stars.