The title is a borrowed, unfinished sentence. "That time of year thou mayst" is the opening of Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, which continues "in me behold." Dave Bonta stops the line at "mayst," leaving the verb of seeing hanging, and then starts his poem with a blunter version of it: "I hate to look upon / the land." Shakespeare's speaker gently invites a beloved to notice his autumn. Bonta's speaker admits he can hardly bear to look, and no listener appears in the poem at all.
What he sees is not decay but something stranger: "how / strange a perfection / is a year's time." The word "perfection" carries two meanings here. A year is beautiful, but it is also complete, a circle that has closed. The reader can infer why that would be hard to watch. A year can finish perfectly and begin again, while a human life, the poem suggests, does not get the same second round. The syntax adds to the unease. "How strange a perfection is a year's time" is bent out of ordinary word order, so the sentence feels slightly archaic, as if Shakespeare's phrasing were still echoing under the plain modern voice.
The poem's shape is small and quiet. It has two quatrains of very short lines, mostly three to six syllables, with no rhyme and no regular meter. The brevity matters. Where Shakespeare has fourteen lines and a tidy argument, Bonta has eight lines and a handful of images. The enjambments make the reader lean forward: "to see how" ends the line before the thing to be seen arrives, and "look upon" ends before the land does. The one dash, after "land," works like a held breath before the thought turns from looking to understanding.
The second stanza shrinks the view. The wide "land" of the first stanza becomes "the yard," a domestic, human-sized space. Night does not fall from the sky here; it "comes" *from the yard*, as though darkness were something that gathers low and rises out of the ground. That small reversal makes the evening feel close and almost personal, like something living in the speaker's own backyard.
Then come the poem's two metaphors, laid side by side without explanation: "Age is my canary, / a root sent to bed." A canary is double-edged. It is a songbird, which recalls the "sweet birds" of Shakespeare's sonnet, and its yellow may quietly echo the sonnet's "yellow leaves." It is also the miner's early-warning bird, the creature that senses poisoned air first. Age, then, is a small caged thing that sings and warns at once. The speaker does not fight it. He keeps it, and the word "my" makes it almost a pet.
The root offers a different kind of comfort. A root going dormant for winter is not dead, so the image holds a thread of hope, the possibility of spring. But the phrasing is odd and a little chilling: "sent to bed." It sounds like a child being dismissed at bedtime, and "sent" implies that someone else gives the order. The word "bed" also recalls the sonnet's "deathbed." The image is tender and ominous at once, and the poem refuses to say which feeling wins. Its last words are neither a lament nor a consolation, just a root, a bed, and the dark.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it trusts compression. It does not retell Sonnet 73 or argue with it. It lets the reader's memory of Shakespeare's autumn do part of the work, then shows how the same fear sounds in a smaller, more private voice. Shakespeare's speaker ends by turning toward the beloved, hoping that seeing his decline will make love stronger. Bonta's speaker has turned away from the land and has only the yard, the canary and the root left. Whether that is bleaker or simply more honest is left for the reader to decide, and that open question is the poem's real strength.