Falling in love is one of the oldest phrases in the language, and Dave Bonta's "Felled" quietly turns it inside out. The speaker doesn't fall into love. Love "is fallen upon me," as a tree comes down on whatever stands beneath it. The title sets the same violent scene before the first line begins, and the poem then asks what is left once the tree is down.
The first stanza is built on a strange comparison. Love is not likened to a thing but to an act: "like cutting down a tree / to make better light." The grammar is slippery. Is love the axe, the falling trunk, or the clearing? The slipperiness seems deliberate, because the stanza holds destruction and benefit in a single sentence. Something large and long-standing is removed, and the stated reason is practical, even gentle: "better light." The tree is never named as the self, but the second stanza pushes us that way. If love is a felling, the thing felled is probably the speaker's own height, the ego that has been blocking the sun.
That stanza reads as a confession. "With my whole body / I appease my desire / to be nobody." The verb "appease" is revealing. It treats desire as something like a hungry god or an animal that must be calmed, and it suggests the wish for self-erasure is both powerful and a little dangerous. "Whole body" makes the surrender physical, so the poem can be read as erotic, devotional, or both at once. The wordplay is hard to miss, too: "nobody" literally contains "body," and the rhyme between "body" and "nobody" ties the stanza together. To be nobody, the speaker uses a body, and the body is still there inside the word, however hard the speaker tries to disappear. The poem doesn't comment on this contradiction, which is part of its honesty.
The turn comes with "but." Until now the speaker has been inside the experience. In the last stanza they step back and look at others: "fanatic tenants" who "would garden on so little ground / being almost starved." Tenants don't own the land, so they work at someone else's mercy. Fanatics lack all proportion. Put together with hunger, the image explains something about devotion: people with the least are often the most intense about what they have. The conditional "would" matters here. The speaker is imagining, working out why anyone would cultivate a scrap of earth so obsessively, and the answer is scarcity. The clearing from the first stanza now looks like that small plot, a patch of ground opened up by loss and tended with desperate care. Whether the starving belong to the tenants or to the speaker is left open, and either reading adds to the poem's unease.
The form is spare. Three tercets, no punctuation, all lowercase, so nothing marks where one thought stops except the line breaks and the "but." There is no regular rhyme scheme, though "me" and "tree" chime at the start and "body" and "nobody" echo each other in the middle, as if the poem rhymes only where the meaning insists on it. The rhythm is loose and conversational. The first two stanzas run five or six syllables a line, which makes them feel clipped and tight. The final stanza stretches to nine and eight syllables ("but I see how fanatic tenants / would garden on so little ground"), like a view opening up, and then closes on the short, hard "being almost starved." The sounds help too: the f of "fallen" and "felled" returns in "fanatic," and the soft g of "garden" and "ground" gives the last lines a dug-in, earthy quality.
The poem is significant because it declines to flatter love. It admits that love can be experienced as loss of self, as hunger, even as a kind of fanaticism, and it still holds on to the idea of light. In a dozen or so lines, it offers a way to see devotion as a response to deprivation and as a way of making something grow in the space where something else stood.