Four short lines, no capital letters and no punctuation, and Dave Bonta still manages to turn a familiar point of view upside down. Most of the time we look at trees as something to use. "Timber" asks what the wood itself makes of being used, and the answer arrives in the first line: nothing. The poem is about the gap between human meaning and the material meaning is made from. Its central idea is that we dedicate our buildings to love, rest and family, while the wood neither knows nor cares.
The first stanza has no verb. "the great indifference of the wood / to the business of years" is a fragment, a noun phrase that just stands there, and the grammar suits the subject. Wood does nothing in this stanza; it simply is, and it is indifferent. The word "great" gives that indifference a certain grandeur, the way we might speak of a great silence or a great calm. It is not coldness so much as scale. The phrase "business of years" is just as carefully chosen. Years are given a "business," as if time were a busy, bustling enterprise full of errands and deadlines, and the wood is simply not interested. There is a faint joke in it, too, since "none of your business" is exactly the attitude the wood seems to take toward time's affairs.
The title does some quiet work here. "Timber" is wood already seen through human eyes, trees sorted into something fit for building. Inside the poem, though, Bonta uses the plainer word "wood," which can mean both the material and the place where trees grow. The poem therefore has two vocabularies, one for what we call it and one for what it is. That tension carries the whole piece. Before humans arrive it is wood, and after they arrive it is timber.
Humans do arrive in the second stanza, and the grammar changes with them. Suddenly there are verbs: "come," "build," "is." The pronoun "they" is never explained, so the builders stay anonymous, a vague crowd who might include us. "When" works as the hinge between the two stanzas, moving from the timeless to the occasional. The next line is more slippery: "it is but another temple to home and bed." What is "it"? It could be the wood, or the finished building, and the poem lets the two blur, which suits the idea that the material stays the same whatever it becomes. The phrase "but another" is deflating. A temple would normally be unique, set apart, but this one is just the latest in a series, and the wood treats it like the last one.
Then comes the odd, lovely choice of "temple." Bonta applies sacred language to the most ordinary things, "home and bed." Judging by the imagery, he is not mocking this. Bed is where most lives are begun, rested and ended, and calling the place that holds it a temple honors that. So the poem pulls two ways. We make our houses holy, and the wood does not notice. The line can sound like a put-down of human self-importance, or like a tender recognition that sacredness is something we bring with us.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, which keeps it from sounding like a neat pronouncement. The first stanza has a slow, nearly iambic stride, ending on the heavy "wood." The last line is the longest, stretching through a run of small, soft words, "it is but another," before settling on "bed." That ending echoes the earlier "wood," two short, dull, solid words that both close on a "d." It isn't a rhyme, but it does rhyme in feeling, tying the material to the purpose we give it. Even the repeated "b" sounds in "business," "build," "but" and "bed" give the poem a faint wooden knock.
What makes "Timber" significant is how much it does in so few words. It changes our sense of who is doing the looking, sets slow time against busy time, and makes the reader feel both small and a little cherished. The wood goes on being wood, and we go on needing a place to sleep.