The title of "Tunnel Vision" does double duty. The trail is literally a "straight tunnel / through dripping woods," but tunnel vision is also a habit of mind, seeing only what the path allows. Dave Bonta sets that narrowness against a dream from the night before. Then, instead of letting the dream win, he quietly takes its advantage away.
The dream is the more exciting place. The speaker is "ready to cross a mountain / where roads & trails / hadn't yet been thought of, / not even by the animals." That last phrase is the clever part. Even the animals, who make so many of our paths, haven't got there yet, so this is a landscape before any route exists. Yet the destination isn't paradise. The brothers have found "another hollow / parallel to this one," a copy of the ordinary valley, where "riotous growth pressed / against the windowpanes / & light-starved houseplants / rotted in their pots." The image contradicts itself: wild abundance outside, starvation and rot inside. Even in the dream, something is going wrong in a closed room.
The morning's reality is stated flatly: "the trail ends as always." The word "always" carries the poem's sense of routine. The colors turn sickly, with "dying laurel bushes" and "brown & yellow bracken." The best image is the fog-filled valley glowing "in the weak sunlight / like the belly of a carp." It is vivid, pale and faintly unappetizing, a landscape seen from underwater. Beauty is present, but it is wet, fishy and a little unwholesome. The deer follows the same logic. She grazes to the "patter of urine," a sound that borrows the language of rain and fits the dripping woods. Her pelt is "already quivering / under the feet of her daily flies." "Pelt" is a word for a skin that has been removed, and "already" hints at the decay waiting for her. "Daily" makes even that menace a matter of routine.
The poem's construction supports this mood. It is free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter, and the short lines move in small steps. Enjambment is used for delay and pressure. "I'd been / ready to cross a mountain" holds the speaker in a state of readiness for a moment, and "far heavier / than its credit card-sized / counterpart" makes the reader feel the weight before the sentence lets go. Plosive sounds recur: "dripping," "pressed," "pots," "patter," "pelt." They imitate the sound of drops and footfalls. The b-sounds of "a-bristle," "brown," "bracken" and "belly" give the ridge a rough texture. The ampersands make the poem look like quick notes, as if the speaker were jotting it down on the walk. There are also no stanza breaks, so the poem is one unbroken column of text, a verbal tunnel that matches the trail.
The ending carries the main idea. The camera "travels the length of the trail / in both directions." The phrase is ambiguous, since it may be the camera or the gaze behind it that moves, but either way the movement is back and forth, going nowhere new. The real camera is "far heavier" than the "credit card-sized" one in the dream, which is the dream's last advantage: an imagined world where seeing is effortless and light. Then comes the final line, "& just as empty." The word "just" cancels the difference. The dream device captured nothing either. What makes the poem interesting is that it declines the usual nature-poem epiphany. The woods give no revelation, and the dream, which the reader expects to be an escape, offers no better way of seeing. The poem suggests that the problem lies in how the speaker looks, not in the place.
That honesty is its significance. The poem treats the dull walk, the decaying plants and the fly-covered deer as details worth looking at, even though the speaker can't turn them into a picture or a meaning. The emptiness of the camera becomes a confession that is oddly more satisfying than a triumphant ending. The speaker keeps walking the tunnel, with the camera heavy around his neck, and lets the reader notice what the lens has failed to hold.