Three short lines, and an entire landscape comes to life. Mike Stone sets a desert plain under the moon, puts one tree in it, and lets that tree call out. Then a mountain, far off, calls back. That is the whole event, yet the poem is about something larger than it looks: even the emptiest, most isolated place can hold a conversation. Solitude, it quietly suggests, is rarely as total as it seems.
Start with the first line. "Desert plain awash in moonlight" is a picture with no main verb, a scene held perfectly still. The word "awash" does a great deal of work, though. It is a water word, and a desert is defined by the lack of water. The moonlight becomes a tide that has flooded the flat ground, so for one night the land has the thing it normally lacks. The light is cold and silvery, the plain wide and bare, and together they clear a stage of everything except the two performers about to speak.
The first is "a single eucalyptus." Both "single" and the indefinite "A" stress isolation: not *the* eucalyptus, but one tree, any tree, alone. It is also by far the longest word in the poem. Four syllables among mostly one- and two-syllable words, it rises out of the line the way a tree rises from a flat plain. Then comes the surprise of the verb: "hoots." We expect owls to hoot, not trees. Judging by the imagery, there are several ways to take it, such as an owl hidden in the branches or wind moving through the leaves, but the poem refuses to choose. It simply gives the tree a voice and turns it into a creature. "Hoots" also shares its long "oo" vowel with "moonlight," so the sound seems to grow out of the light around it, as if the night itself were making the noise.
The form is spare. There is no rhyme, and the lines are short enough to recall a haiku in their compactness, though by my count the syllables run seven, eight, seven rather than following the traditional pattern. The punctuation is more interesting. The first line ends in a semicolon, a pause that sets the scene apart. The second ends in a comma, a mark that says the sentence is unfinished, and then comes a blank space, the stanza break, before the last line arrives. That gap is the poem's best trick. It stands for the distance across the desert and the delay of an echo. The tree calls, silence stretches, and only after the white space does "A distant mountain answers." The reader waits just as the tree must wait.
That final line deserves a slow look. "Distant" tells us how far the reply has travelled, and "answers" is a verb of dialogue, of relationship. A mountain is almost the opposite of a tree: huge, immovable, silent by reputation. Yet it responds in kind, and the soft s-sounds of "distant" and "answers" trail off like the tail of an echo. Because the reply may well be an echo, a gentle ambiguity opens up. Perhaps the mountain is a separate voice, or perhaps the tree is only hearing itself returned. Either reading is poignant. In the first, loneliness is relieved; in the second, it is only mirrored. Stone does not say, and the poem is richer for it.
What makes the poem significant is this economy. It has no human figure, no "I," no named emotion, yet it is full of feeling, because it hands the oldest human gesture, calling out and waiting for an answer, to the landscape itself. It also shows how much a poem can do with very little. All the action sits in two verbs, "hoots" and "answers," and everything else is stillness, light and distance. The poem ends on the reply, not on any comment about it, so we are left in the silence afterwards, in that moonlit emptiness, wondering who else might be listening.