Most of us say "time heals" without thinking about it. In Dave Bonta's "Timekeeper" the phrase turns up only in the final line, and by then it is no longer a comfort but a wish. Everything before it is an odd, sideways account of what it feels like when time has stopped behaving.
The syntax is slippery from the start: "Time gone, I fell upon / boring holes in the clock / and calling it chance." "Boring" can be a verb (drilling holes) or an adjective (dull holes), and the grammar never settles on one. Either way, the speaker seems to be damaging the clock while insisting it was an accident. The poem never says why time has "gone". The phrase "every particular of home" hints at distance or loss, but that is an inference, and the poem leaves the cause open.
The next image is the most memorable. The speaker keeps "a month or two with me / like water in a boat." A sensible sailor bails water out, yet here the water is kept. Time becomes a liquid that the holes in the clock let in, and the line break after "black" lets that word hang for a moment before we learn what darkens it: "every particular of home." The word "particular" matters. The blackness comes from specific remembered things, not from sorrow in general. Memory is both ballast and danger, because it keeps the boat low in the water.
The middle of the poem turns outward to "the fanatics / who cry up death." To "cry up" something is to praise it loudly, like a market trader, and the verb makes these people sound like salesmen for dying. They "will not pay for time," which puts a price on it. Then comes the strangest simile: refusing to pay is "like a road when we have / no money for ordinary dirt." A road is just dirt made useful, so the comparison suggests that time is the cheapest, most basic material of life, and the fanatics act as if even that were unaffordable. I read this as a quiet rebuke, though the image is deliberately knotty and other readings are possible.
The speaker, by contrast, spends. "Building my house / a story higher, saving light" is practical, even cheerful work. The word "story" probably does double duty, meaning a floor of the house and a narrative that keeps adding to itself. Note, though, that "saving" echoes the earlier "keeping." The speaker is still a hoarder, but now of light instead of black water, so the poem suggests that what we hold onto can change.
Structurally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular beat. It is three sentences long, each longer and calmer than the one before. Many lines end on weak, unfinished words ("upon," "with," "when we have"), so the reader's breath keeps tipping over the edge of the line, a little like the leaking the poem describes. Sound does some quiet work too. The long "o" of "holes," "boat," "home," "road" and "no" recurs through the poem like a hollow note, and it is the sound of the very things the speaker has lost or longs for.
The ending is plain by comparison. "I long to see time heal" is built entirely of one-syllable words. After all the tangled images, the speaker simply says what they want. "Long" is itself a time word, so even the wish is measured in duration. The poem also forms a loop. It begins on "Time gone," a loss already complete, and ends on "time heal," which looks ahead, and the only distance between them is the span of the poem.
The poem is significant because it tests a cliché instead of repeating it. It doesn't promise that time will heal, only that the speaker would like to be there to see it. The images are all domestic and physical (a boat, a road, a house) and none of them is explained, so the reader has to work out how they connect. That makes the poem feel less like a lesson about grief or waiting than like a stretch of time we are made to sit through, and it's one that many readers will recognise.