Dave Bonta's "Time Lines" starts in the middle of things: "and the deer came". The lowercase "and" makes it feel as if the walk was already under way before we joined it. What follows looks like an ordinary late-autumn hike, with deer, gnats, mist, birches and milkweed, but the poem gradually turns the hillside into a calendar of geological time. Its central idea is that a walker's body can be a measuring tool for the mountain and for the ages written into it. The speaker says as much: "i measured the mountain / with my body pacing it out."
The form copies that pacing. The poem is a chain of unrhymed couplets with no capitals and no punctuation, so the reader moves from one pair of lines to the next without signposts. Sentences leak across the stanza breaks and sometimes change direction as they go. "for one day only / everything must go" reads like a shop-window clearance sign, until the next couplet attaches it to "a gray mist that may / have been in my head." The lines are short and their stresses uneven, like steps on rough ground. Because nothing is pinned down by a full stop, the speaker's uncertainty carries into the structure: the mist might be weather, or it might be his own mind.
The first half is full of small, exact images that already hint at age. The antlers clash with "a sound / old and dry as the wind", a simile that makes a single noise feel ancient. The gnats dance "as if / summer had returned", a false warmth in a season where "the leaves" are "mostly down". The joke about everything going cheap is funny and a little bleak, since autumn is a clearance sale of its own. The birches are "nothing but blank pages", and the milkweed is "giving birth to clouds", so its drifting seed-fluff becomes sky. The blank pages quietly feed into the title. Lines can be words on a page, a route on a map, or bands of rock in a hillside. Even "gravevines", as the poem spells it, has the word "grave" tucked inside it, a small reminder of endings in the middle of all the growing.
The turn comes when the bare trees open up the view. Looking down, the speaker sees "the remains of a car / wheels-up", a human relic already sinking into the grass. Next to it, the "old coal railroad" brings the human story close to the geological one, because coal is itself the compressed remains of ancient swamp forests. The poem then leaps into the "age of fishes", a "mass extinction", and the "age of amphibians / and giant dragonflies". The grammar blurs here. "Abandoned" seems to belong to the car, but it slides into the language of geology, so that the wreck and the vanished seas sit on the same scale. The time spans are huge ("62 million years"), yet the poem treats them in the same plain, conversational tone as the deer.
The pun on climbing is the cleverest move. Rock layers get younger as you go up, so "getting younger / as i climbed" is literally true of the strata, and it also suggests the lift a walker feels on a high path. The earlier layers were "pressed into rock by later layers / now sloughed off". "Sloughed" is a word for shedding skin, and it makes the mountain a body that has lost its covering, which echoes the speaker's own body pacing across it.
The ending is the poem's one moment of open beauty: "the horizon opened like a rose / on ever more mountains." A rose is built from layered petals, just as the hillside is built from layered time, and "ever more" suggests there are further ridges, and further ages, beyond the one he can see. There is no final full stop, so the poem stops without closing.
What makes "Time Lines" worth reading is that it makes deep time something you can feel with your feet instead of something you are lectured about. It doesn't deny that "everything must go", but it finds a kind of comfort in the scale: deer, car, and speaker are all brief, and the view still opens.