Five short lines, no capital letters, not a single punctuation mark, and yet Dave Bonta's "Sylvanian" delivers a verdict on the modern world. Put plainly, its claim is that there is no refuge. No place, not even nature, has kept out unease or the habit of tallying everything up for sale. What makes the poem odd and memorable is who says so: not a person, but a wood.
The opening sentence refuses to sit still. "no place or nature at all / prevented disquiet / or the count of commodities." The most natural reading is that nothing, not even wilderness, held back anxiety or the bookkeeping of goods. But the line break after "prevented disquiet" lets that phrase stand alone for a beat, and in that beat it seems to say the opposite, that something did stop unease. With no punctuation to settle the matter, both readings hover, and the reader is left slightly unsettled, which suits the subject. The word "disquiet" is itself "quiet" with a negative prefix bolted on, so the very thing we hope a wood will give us is built into the word as something removed.
The diction in that first stanza is abstract and Latinate: "nature," "prevented," "disquiet," "commodities." These are the words of ledgers and arguments. The second stanza drops into plain, mostly one-syllable speech: "so spoke the old wood / in my fallen ear." The line lengths follow suit. The first stanza runs at roughly seven, six and eight syllables, uneven and a little breathless, while the last two lines settle into a steady five and five. It is as if the argument has been made and something older now takes over. There is no rhyme, but there is a good deal of sound-play. "So spoke the old" strings together three long *o* sounds, a hollow, resonant tone like a knock on a trunk. "At all" in the first line quietly returns as "fallen" in the last, as though the fall was already foretold.
"so spoke" has an oracular, almost scriptural ring, and "old" gives the wood the authority of age. There is also an irony the poem never mentions. Wood is timber, and timber is about as countable as a commodity can be: felled, measured, priced. So the speaker, the wood, belongs to the very category it is warning about. It is hard not to hear in this a speaker who knows exactly how it is regarded.
"fallen ear" is the richest phrase, and the poem declines to choose among its meanings. The ear may be literally low, pressed to the forest floor like a fallen branch, listening. It may be "fallen" in the old moral sense, a human faculty that has lost its innocence and now hears only anxiety and prices. And since "ear" can also mean an ear of grain, the phrase can carry a harvest image, another thing that is dropped, gathered and counted. Judging by the imagery, the poem wants all of these in play at once.
The title adds another layer. "Sylvanian" grows from the Latin word for wood, and the *-ian* ending turns it into a name for someone who belongs to a place, a citizen of the trees. That makes the poem's situation curious. The speaker is, by title, a native of the woods, yet the ear is "fallen" and the news is unwelcome. Belonging and exile seem to sit in the same word.
The poem's significance lies partly in what it refuses to do. A great deal of nature writing offers the wood as a cure, a place where worry dissolves. Here the wood speaks, and what it says is that no such escape exists. Yet the ending is not entirely bleak. Something is still speaking, and something, however fallen, is still listening. The lack of a full stop leaves the last line open, as though the voice has not finished and the ear is still lowered to hear it. In a handful of words the poem is both a disenchantment and, faintly, an act of attention.