Forestry, as the word is usually used, belongs to people with trucks and ledgers: the managing, measuring and harvesting of trees. Dave Bonta's poem begins in that world, with "trucks going backwards" and "limestone / being ground down", and then wanders off into a different kind of forestry, practised on foot with nothing but attention. Its central idea is that a walker's noticing is a form of accounting, and that this private tally can answer the sense of loss that autumn brings.
The form suits the walking. The poem is written entirely in couplets, in lowercase, with no punctuation at all. Lines are short, often three or four words, so the reader moves in small steps, and sentences spill over the gaps between stanzas the way a path continues past a bend. The poem is unrhymed until the middle, where a chime arrives: "a faceless old doll's head" is answered by "what fertile words of smoke / would you have me spread". The rhyme lands just as the speaker starts talking to a puffball, as if the poem itself had been given a moment of ceremony. The sound-work elsewhere is precise. "Silk threads scintillate" hisses and glitters. "Whistle while they glean" sounds like the kinglets it describes. The raven's "ark ark ark" is nearly pure noise. Even the machines get animal voices, since the trucks "yelp".
A thread of money runs through the imagery, and it is easy to miss. The morning is "old gold", the kinglets are "golden-crowned", and the poem ends on "glowing jetsam". Meanwhile the jay carries acorns in its "throat pouch" and the squirrel buries one, so both are saving. Then the speaker admits he has been "pondering questions / of macroeconomics". The joke is gentle but sharp. Abstract thinking about whole economies sits beside a squirrel running its own small, practical one. The squirrel even "sees me watching / and digs it up again", which treats the human observer as an auditor who has just been refused access to the books.
The poem turns on the line "when the leaves fall / there's always some disillusionment". The word contains "illusion", and the poem has just been building one. Silk threads bind each blueberry plant "to the next / as if the whole forest / lay under a spell". Disillusionment is that spell breaking. Judging by the imagery, the loss is partly one of scale. With the leaves gone, the ridgelines look "lower" and the moon is a distant "shell", a husk with nothing inside. The woods seem to shrink and empty out.
The poem does not stay there. "But i've been tallying / the mountain's sugar maples", the speaker says, and the verb carries the earlier economic language into something gentler. Counting trees is a way of paying attention, and attention is what the poem offers against disappointment. The final images are tender. The trunks are "pale as columns of breath", which echoes the puffball's "words of smoke". They are "moss-lipped", so they seem almost able to speak. They stand "ringed by drifts / of glowing jetsam". Jetsam is cargo thrown overboard on purpose to lighten a ship in trouble, so it suits trees that shed their leaves deliberately. What looks like wreckage glows, and loss becomes something closer to salvage.
The poem is significant for how much it holds in so little space. It is close nature observation, with its jays, kinglets and chipmunks, and it is also a small argument about how to live with decline. It is funny too: "i change hats" after the chipmunk rushes past is a perfect deadpan moment. And it never states a moral. The poem lets the maples have the last word, and its answer to disillusionment is to keep counting what is still standing.