Dave Bonta's "Diagnostic" begins as a small comedy of humility and ends as an ecological warning. A walker in the woods copies what he sees: "I sat on the ground because / that's what the boulder was doing. / It seemed only right." The deadpan tone is part of the charm. He then lies back in the leaf litter "to join the giant oak tree / in tracking the sun," as if he could belong to the forest by imitation. Everything here is gentle, slow and companionable.
The third stanza changes the weather. The woods have "a clear view beneath the canopy," and everything except "the rocks & ferns" has been "reduced / to telltale pellets." The poem never names the culprit, but the pellets are presumably droppings, and the image suggests animals have stripped the undergrowth bare. Then comes the flat self-reproach: "I should've kept my distance." The speaker has read the landscape correctly but a little too late.
What follows is almost a miniature horror story told in understatement. On the walk home he feels something on his face three times and can't dislodge it. Hours later, at supper, the thing drops from his collar: "a tiny, red & black barnacle of an insect." The barnacle is a sharp choice. It pulls a sea creature into a forest poem, and it brings with it the ideas of clinging, hardness and refusal to let go. (A tick is strictly an arachnid, but "insect" sounds like the speaker's casual, unscientific voice.) The poem has been quietly telling us that what is wrong with this forest could travel home with us.
The line and stanza breaks carry much of the drama. "My thumb came down" ends a stanza and leaves a small silence before "& crushed it against the smooth white wood." The reader's pause matches the lifted thumb. The sentence also echoes the opening, where the speaker lowered himself to the ground out of deference. At the start he goes down to join nature. By the end he brings his hand down on it. The clean, smooth table makes a stark contrast with the leaf duff and boulders, and the small violence happens in the human, domestic world.
The form is free verse, with no rhyme and no regular meter. The stanzas run three, three, five, three, four and four lines, so the shape is loose and conversational, like a story told over supper. The ampersands, used throughout, give it the look of a field-notebook entry. The diction mixes the plain ("sat," "felt," "dropped") with a few exact words: "duff," "canopy," "telltale." That mixture lets the speaker sound like both a casual walker and an attentive observer.
The final stanza turns from anecdote to something close to proverb, and the meaning comes together there. "Clear views are dangerous here" overturns a common assumption. We usually think openness means health, beauty and safety, but in this forest it is a symptom. The last sentence, "Only a sick forest can harbor / such distances," turns on the verb "harbor." A harbor is a place of shelter, yet we also say a body or place harbors disease. The forest shelters its emptiness and, by implication, the ticks as well. "Distances" is a word that has appeared before. The speaker should have kept his distance, but the real trouble is that the forest has too much of it: too many sightlines and too little tangle.
The title does its work too. A diagnostic is a test that reveals a hidden condition, and the poem uses two of them. The forest's bare floor is a symptom to be read. The tick is the proof that the reading is correct. The speaker's own skin, with its unexplained itch, becomes the place where the forest's condition shows up.
The poem is significant because it makes its argument without lecturing. It never explains why the understory is gone or what it means, and it trusts the reader to put the pellets, the clear view and the tick together. The mood sits somewhere between wry and uneasy. It turns an ordinary nature walk into a lesson in how to read a place, and it suggests that damage to an ecosystem will eventually reach even the person who lay down in it so politely.