An old man wakes, and the place he arrives is not the morning but a night far behind him. Dave Bonta's "Time Traveller" is eight short lines and a single sentence, yet it holds an entire marriage between its first word, "Now," and its last, "wife." The title promises something like science fiction, but the poem needs no machine. The vehicle is sleep, and the passenger is a dying man.
The poem's construction is its most inventive feature. Everything before the sixth line is a pile of descriptions: "an old / consumptive man, / cold, kept to my bed / and overtaking / the sea in sleep." The main verb, "I wake," is held back until almost the end, so we spend most of the poem in a suspended present, waiting for something to happen. When the verb comes, it lands on a small, directional word: "I wake to." The line break leaves the preposition hanging, and for a moment the sentence seems to point anywhere. Then the next two lines fill it in: "the first night / I lay with my wife." The syntax itself makes the journey. It takes its time and then arrives all at once.
The verb "wake" does the poem's quietest trick. Ordinarily waking brings us back to the present, to the sickroom and the body. Here it delivers him into the past. Sleep, usually the place where we leave reality, becomes the true present, and waking becomes the act of time travel.
The imagery shifts between the clinical and the elemental. "Consumptive" is an old-fashioned word for a sufferer of tuberculosis, and its root, "consume," carries a second meaning of burning up or being devoured. The man is being used up, and the first night with his wife may be remembered as a time when appetite ran the other way. "Cold, kept to my bed" is clipped and hard, with its repeated *c* and *k* sounds, and the passive "kept" suggests he is confined by something he doesn't control. Then the sound opens out: "overtaking / the sea in sleep" is all long, flowing vowels and soft *s* sounds. The sea is never explained, which is part of its power. Judging by the imagery, it may stand for time, or for death, and "overtaking" suggests he is moving faster than it, slipping ahead of whatever is coming for him by going backward. That reading is an inference, but the verb's sense of passing something at speed gives it support.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. Its lines run from three to five syllables, which gives it a hushed, breathless pace, like someone speaking quietly in a sickroom. Still, there are echoes. "Old" in the first line is answered by "cold" in the third, so decay and chill are linked early. The ending then gathers a cluster of long *i* sounds: "night," "I," "my," "wife." The sound brightens as the memory arrives, and the poem closes on warmth.
The bed is also the poem's hinge. It appears in the present as a place of confinement ("kept to my bed") and in the past as a place of intimacy ("I lay with"). The verb "lay" is plain and slightly old-fashioned, and it asks us to hear the same piece of furniture twice. One bed holds both the beginning of a life shared and the end of it. The poem never says that the wife is dead, absent, or at his side, and it never says whether he is dreaming, remembering, or really going back. That silence keeps the ending open.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little. It states no grief and no moral, and "my wife" is given no name and no adjective. The restraint is the emotion. By choosing this one night out of a whole life, the poem suggests what a person might carry to the very end, and that the oldest, most intimate memories may be the ones that stay closest to the surface. It also suggests that love can work against time, since the old man doesn't merely remember the night but wakes into it. In eight lines, the poem turns the usual direction of a life around.