Stare at a rock face long enough and it grows a snout. Dave Bonta's "Sinking Valley" begins with that experience, the way a limestone cliff slowly resolves into animals, and turns it into a walk through a landscape where nothing stays solid. The speaker looks, descends into a cave, comes back up, and admits at the end, "i come to no conclusions." The poem's central idea is that nature invites us to read meaning into it, but it never confirms our readings and was never addressed to us in the first place.
The warning comes early: "don't call them angelic / they're not here for you." The cliff-beasts gather "as if / to meditate on a corpse," which is a cold, strange picture, and the poem refuses to soften it into comfort. Even the one bird that gets an "oh," the white-breasted nuthatch, is given an "anxiety song." That address is mock-lyrical, a nod to the old habit of apostrophizing birds, and the poem immediately undercuts the habit by hearing worry where tradition would hear joy. Then comes the question that holds the poem together: "who's to say what's real / in a valley full of sinkholes." The ground itself is unreliable, so perception is too.
The form fits this unsteadiness. The poem is written in short, unpunctuated couplets, almost all in lowercase, with even the pronoun "i" kept small. Each pair of lines is a small step, and the white space between them works like the dark between footholds. The one colon, after "hidden from the sun:", opens onto the poem's biggest image. Rhyme is rare but striking when it comes. "A puzzle of muzzles / a marl of snarls" is packed with sound play, and its clustered consonants mimic the rough, grumbling texture of the rock. Elsewhere the poem stays in plain speech, so those moments stand out.
The imagery moves between the visible and the buried. Above ground, "bare trees are brooms / for this bitter wind to ride," a witchy picture, and the wind rides "right into the earth," so even the weather is drawn downward. The locust is "ornately thorned / against mastodons," a wonderful detail: the tree still wears armor against animals that are long gone, which suggests that this landscape carries ghosts of older ones. The hemlocks are "threadbare" and "unaccustomed to so much sun," so the surface world already looks thinned and exposed.
Then the speaker goes under. "i follow the groundwater / back underground," and the glasses fog "in less than 50 feet," a humble, bodily detail that keeps the descent from becoming grand. The creek now has "echoey voices / that may or may not / be cave divers," and the poem leaves the possibility of drowned explorers hanging there, "drowned in pursuit / of an inner space." The phrase "inner space" works two ways, as a physical cavern and as the inner life, and it hints that searching downward for meaning can be fatal.
The "grove of impossible trees" is the most inventive passage. Judging by the imagery, these "stems said to be slender / as drinking straws" are cave formations, thin mineral growths that hang like straws, and the "better halves" they have met are their counterparts growing up to meet them. The lines "growing down / as they grew up" fold the poem's whole geometry into one paradox: the world above has a hidden twin below. Notice the phrase "said to be," though. The speaker doesn't claim to have seen them, so even the marvel arrives secondhand.
The ending is the cleverest move. The speaker "emerge[s] shivering / into the frigid sunlight," and the cliff is "empty," so the beasts have gone back to being stone. Instead of a revelation, we get goats, "a hundred goats" that "graze their pasture down / to the nubbins." They are real animals doing something simple and hungry. After so much imagined life, the poem ends on actual teeth and actual grass. There is also a quiet joke in it, since the goats strip the field bare just as the speaker's own searching has stripped the valley of its mysteries without any result.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It treats attention as a pleasure and a risk, and it lets the world stay stranger than any conclusion we could draw from it.