An "open schedule" sounds like the opposite of a clock: a calendar with nothing written in it, hours nobody has claimed. Yet Dave Bonta's five-line poem begins with the clock and never lets go of it. "My clock / is the only tune." The title promises freedom, and the poem shows what that freedom is made of. When the appointments disappear, what remains is time itself, ticking and audible, the speaker's only accompaniment.
The word "tune" is the hinge of the opening. A clock doesn't play a melody, it keeps a beat, and calling that beat a tune turns pressure into music. The line can be heard in two moods at once. It might be lonely, one repeated note in an empty room. It might also be content, since a speaker who answers to no one else's rhythm may find one rhythm enough. "Only" carries both meanings, "sole" and "merely." The possessive "My" matters too. This isn't the office clock or the school bell but a private, owned time.
The third line is the longest and the most slippery: "Nothing passes without time." On the surface it is almost a tautology, because passing is what time does. But "passes" can mean hours elapsing, a feeling fading, or a cup or bottle being handed around a table. "Without time" can mean "if time is absent" or "unless time is spent." The sentence has the flatness of a proverb, something too obvious to need saying. In the context of an open schedule, though, it reads like a discovery. With nothing external to mark the hours, they have to be lived through, one after another.
Then comes the dash, and the poem drops away. The lines run roughly two, five and seven syllables, then shrink to "no days, / no wine," two syllables each. The poem swells to its longest line and tapers to almost nothing, as if the speaker were running out of words or settling into stillness. The rhythm supports this. "is the ONly TUNE" moves along with an easy lilt, while "no DAYS, / no WINE" is slow and weighted, each word nearly a full stop. The repeated "no" works like a second tick, a drumbeat that mimics the clock the poem started with.
Sound ties the frame together. The poem has no rhyme in the traditional sense, but "My," "time" and "wine" share the same long vowel, and "time" and "wine" almost rhyme, differing only in the closing hum of m and n. The effect is quiet, a faint echo rather than a chime. It quietly links the two ideas the poem cares about, since time and wine end up sounding like relatives.
Wine is the poem's only concrete image in a text otherwise made of abstractions: clock, tune, time, days. It is an apt choice, judging by what wine suggests. It is a drink that depends on waiting, and one we pour to slow an evening or mark an occasion. "No days, no wine" can be read as a fact, since wine needs days to become wine. It can also be read as a loss, since without days there would be nothing to savor. The pairing of a unit of time with a pleasure suggests that the two cannot be separated, and that hours are both the measure of life and what it is made from.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does without raising its voice. It never says whether the clock is a prison or a companion, and it doesn't lecture about "making the most of time." It sets a paradox in front of us: the less our time is scheduled, the more we hear it. Anyone who has stayed home on an empty afternoon, with nowhere to be, knows that sudden awareness of the minutes. The poem's brevity suits its subject, because there is no padding in it, and a poem about time that wasted ours would undermine itself. It leaves us with one image of something good that needs waiting, and the question of what we do while we wait.