Dave Bonta's "The Fullness of Time" starts with a small wobble. The speaker crouches for a book, stands or shifts, and "the room swims". He has to steady himself "with both hands". Nothing seems to happen, but the poem then swings across an ocean to a person who is just waking up. That jump is the poem's real subject: how two people in different time zones can still share one moment, and how fragile and surprising that sharing is.
The first stanza is a tercet. Every stanza after it is a couplet, as if the poem, once steadied, settles into a calmer pace. The dizziness also works as an early image. "Swims" is a watery verb, and the very next stanza places an ocean between speaker and listener. The body's brief loss of balance prepares us for a larger displacement, in which the speaker's evening and the other person's small hours have to be held in the mind together. The phrase "at that very moment" tries to pin the two scenes to a single point in time, even though they are physically far apart.
Almost everything in the middle of the poem is concrete and sensory. "It's 1:00 a.m." gives a precise, slightly bleary time. The scream of "a cat or a fox" is the best detail in the poem because of its uncertainty. Whoever is in that garden can't tell what made the noise, and the speaker, far away, knows only what he is told. The noise belongs to the night in that other place, and by mentioning it the poem lets that night briefly enter ours. Then comes the dog, who "wakes with you / follows you downstairs". The verbs are plain and the dog is loyal, and the scene has the half-asleep drift of someone stumbling into a dark house.
Bonta uses no rhyme and almost no punctuation. There are no full stops, no capital letters, and the ampersand replaces "and". The lines run on like thoughts or like the loose rhythm of a late-night conversation. The only apostrophes appear in the contractions "it's" and "your hair's". The result is a quiet, spoken tone, and it keeps the poem from feeling like a set piece. The statement "we talk" is the shortest in the poem. The longer line that follows, "the five hours between us momentarily erased", does the heavy lifting. The word "momentarily" matters here. It admits that the closeness is temporary, even as it celebrates it.
The title phrase arrives in the sixth stanza as a question: "what the bible means by the phrase / in the fullness of time". The poem does not answer it, and the lack of an answer is revealing. The phrase suggests a moment when time is ripe, complete and ready. The speaker has just experienced something like that, though on a human scale. For a moment the distance has disappeared and two separate hours have become one shared one. The question is also ironic, because it is asked by someone just woken from a nap, in the middle of the night, about time itself. Nobody in the poem is trying to be profound, which makes the idea land more gently. Judging by the lines, the poem is less interested in doctrine than in how rarely any moment feels "full".
The last image completes this idea. "Your hair's still in a bun / pierced by a pair of chopsticks". The detail is small, slightly comic and very tender. It is the kind of thing you notice only when you are really looking at someone, and it suggests (as an inference) that the speaker can see the person he is talking to. "Still" shows that this sleeping and waking is being observed with care. The word "pierced" is sharp for such a soft scene, and it quietly echoes the earlier scream in the garden.
The poem matters because it takes a modern experience, connecting across time zones, and treats it with wonder and not complaint. Distance is usually the problem in such poems, but here it is the backdrop that makes the connection visible. By ending on a hairstyle and not an answer, Bonta suggests that "the fullness of time" is not found in doctrine or in grand statements. It is found in the attentive looking that the poem itself models.