Six short lines, and one of the two characters is a tool. The speaker is in a hut in the woods, and the first thing he tells us about his company is "the ax and I", a pairing that treats the ax as a partner, or even a rival. Together they "try peace", then "rest against the plaster" and "resolve to go dancing / tomorrow". Nothing dramatic happens, yet a whole relationship is sketched: hard labour, exhaustion, and a small, slightly comic wish for a lighter life.
The phrase that carries the poem is "try peace". Peace is usually something we have or keep, but here it is an experiment, a truce being tested. That implies the ax and the man have been at odds, perhaps through a day of swinging and splitting, perhaps through something deeper in the work of living alone among trees. The line is also the shortest in the poem, just two syllables, and both are stressed, so the voice has to slow down and put each word down firmly. Sound helps too. "I" at the end of the previous line and "try" at the start of this one make a quiet rhyme across the line break, the only one in the poem. It is as if the two lines were themselves reaching an agreement.
The second stanza turns on grammar. Because "the ax and I" is the subject of everything that follows, both of them "rest against the plaster", and both "resolve to go dancing". The image is ordinary, since anyone who has put an ax down knows it ends up leaning on a wall. Bonta lets the grammar push the joke further, so that the ax seems to lean there with the speaker, sharing his tired posture and his daydream about a night out. The word "plaster" adds something as well. A plastered wall is a finished, domestic surface, slightly out of place in a "hut in the woods", and it hints that the speaker's rough life has a trace of comfort, or of a world beyond the trees.
The title, "Wood hick", frames all this with self-mockery. "Hick" is an old put-down for a rustic, and the speaker hangs it on himself before anyone else can. Judging by the sound, the two hard, clipped syllables of "wood hick" feel like blows of the ax, though that is my reading of the sounds, not something the poem states. Once the poem begins, the language softens. "Plaster", "resolve", "dancing" and "tomorrow" are longer and more fluid words. The syllable counts follow the same path: the first stanza runs six, four, two, narrowing toward stillness, while the second runs six, six, three. It ends on the loose, trailing three beats of "tomorrow", which feels less like a conclusion than a drifting off.
That last word is the saddest and funniest in the poem. A resolution made for tomorrow is a resolution that may never be kept, and anyone who has promised themselves to start exercising or call a friend will recognise the tone. Dancing is also the right thing to want. Chopping wood and dancing are both rhythmic movements of the whole body, but one is labour and the other is pleasure. And since dancing usually happens with other people, the wish suggests, as an inference from the text, that the hut is a lonely place and the speaker misses company.
The poem has no capital letters and no punctuation, which makes it read like a thought passing through a tired mind rather than a statement. There is no rhyme scheme or fixed meter to speak of, only the pull of short lines and plain, mostly one-syllable words. It has the compression of a haiku without copying the form.
What makes it worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. It treats a tool as a companion, a day's rest as a treaty, and a hope for the future as a small joke the speaker is half in on. It doesn't lecture about solitude or work, and it lets one leaning ax and one postponed dance suggest the rest.