Walk into a leafless forest and you can see straight through it: no green walls, no canopy, just trunks and sky. Dave Bonta's "Inside Out" begins with that sight and gives it a startling comparison: "the forest is like a house / emptied by burglars." The poem then spends the rest of its length quietly arguing against its own opening. The house isn't ruined, only emptied, and what looks like theft turns out to be storage.
The second couplet, "when i am old i hope / to be this free and open," is where the poem turns. Having been robbed would normally be a loss, but here the speaker treats it as a model for old age: stripped down, unguarded, nothing left to hold onto. The next lines, "with fire stolen / from the sun," are open to more than one reading. Judging by the imagery, they may refer to autumn colour and to the sunlight the leaves gathered and then lost, so the burglars' loot is light itself. Either way, the "theft" is made to sound like Prometheus rather than a break-in.
Then the poem changes direction with a question borrowed from song: "but where have all / the caterpillars gone." The phrasing, along with "long time passing" and "they're all in uniform," echoes the refrain of the folk song "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?", in which the missing things were taken off as soldiers. Bonta bends that sad, antiwar echo toward something odder. The caterpillars are "in uniform" because every member of a species looks and behaves alike, and because dormancy is a kind of military discipline: stand still, wait for orders. Between the question and its answer sits the single word repeated on its own line, "hungry / hungry." It sounds like chewing, and it names the caterpillar's whole summer career. It also hints that the forest was partly emptied by appetite before the cold arrived.
The answers come in a deliberately mismatched vocabulary. Insects are "overwintering as sex machines", a flippant phrase that reduces a whole life stage to one job. Next comes the clinical "hemolymph flooded with glycerol / so ice won't form," in which the long, liquid sounds of the line seem to mimic the antifreeze moving through a body. That cold science sits beside tenderness: others lie "dead in the leaf duff / wings neatly folded," a tidy, almost dignified death. The comic, technical and tender registers sit in the same breath, which is how the poem avoids sentimentality about nature.
The best image arrives last: "somewhere an egg / small as the dot of an i." Because the poem writes its own "i" in lowercase, including the speaker's "i" earlier, the egg quietly becomes a self-portrait. The speaker who hoped to be "free and open" in old age is compared to the smallest, most compressed form of life, a point of potential. "Open sesame," the password in the story of Ali Baba and the forty thieves, completes the burglary conceit. In the tale, thieves hide treasure in a cave that opens on a spoken word. Here the burglars' emptied house is really a vault, and spring is the password. It also echoes "open" from the earlier couplet, so freedom and opening bookend the poem.
Formally, the poem is a chain of unrhymed couplets, each only a few words per line, with no capital letters and no full stops. That gives it the feel of a thought being murmured while walking, one clause leading into the next. The line breaks do some of the work: "spring's / open sesame" splits a possessive across the gap, so the reader waits, just as the eggs do. Rhyme is absent, but sound still binds the lines: "stolen" and "sun," "form" and "folded," "dormant" and "duff."
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it changes in so few words. It begins in loss and ends in patience, and the title, "Inside Out," explains the trick. In winter the forest is turned inside out, its structure exposed, while its real life hides inside eggs and chilled bodies. The poem suggests that emptiness can be a form of keeping, and that growing old might look less like being robbed than like being opened.