Most of us think of a song as something that lasts. It gets stuck in the head, it gets recorded, it outlives the singer. Dave Bonta's "Marking time" opens by claiming the opposite, in four flat words: "a song is fatal." The next line says what it is fatal to: the note, which is "as gone as ash after I play it." Each note is born and burned in the same instant, and the speaker is the one who strikes the match. Ash is what remains once a fire has finished, so the comparison suggests the note has already done all its living by the time anyone could try to hold it.
The sound of that line carries the idea. The short *a* repeats in "as," "ash" and "after," and the line is long, eleven words against the four of the first. It thins out toward the quiet, almost shrugging "play it." The poem shows a note disappearing as well as saying so.
The second couplet is where the grammar gets interesting. "who having great need / to meet myself at the harp" is a sentence that has started without a main verb, so the reader is left waiting, in suspense, much as a listener waits for the next note. The verb finally arrives in the last couplet: "take for granted." Because it is "take" and not "takes," it seems to agree with the "I" of the first stanza. That gives a reading something like: *I, who need so badly to meet myself at the harp, simply assume that time is knocking nails.* It could also be read as a command, an instruction to the reader to accept the knocking. The poem doesn't choose, and the ambiguity feels deliberate.
"Meet myself" is a striking phrase. It makes the self sound like someone to be met by appointment, even a slight stranger, and the harp is the place of the meeting. The poem's logic then becomes uncomfortable. If the self can only be found in playing, and playing destroys each note as it is made, then the self is also something that exists only while it is being sounded. The need and the loss come from the same act.
The final image turns the whole poem. "Time / is knocking nails" can be heard several ways. It could be a carpenter hammering, or the ticking of a clock, or someone knocking at a door. Judging by the earlier words "fatal" and "ash," the nails also suggest a coffin, so that death seems to frame the poem from both ends. The title feeds into this. "Marking time" can mean keeping the beat in music, and it can also mean idling in place, passing the hours without getting anywhere. Both fit a speaker who plucks a harp while time hammers away behind him. The two sounds are oddly alike: one pluck, one nail, each a separate strike that cannot be taken back.
The form is as stripped down as the language. There are three unrhymed couplets, no capital letters and no punctuation. Nothing marks where a thought ends, which suits a poem about a process that never pauses to let us catch up. The line lengths shrink across the poem, from four and eleven words, to four and six, to five and three. The last line, "is knocking nails," is the shortest, and its hard consonants (*k*, *k*, *n*, *n*) make a small percussive thud. The enjambments help too. "Time" sits alone at the end of its line before the knocking arrives, and "need" hangs in the air before it gets its object.
The poem is significant for how much it fits into so little space. In about thirty words it deals with art, identity and death, and it offers no consolation. It never claims that music defeats time, or that a song is a way of cheating the clock. Instead it suggests that playing is simply the way a person lives inside time, finding themselves only in what is already vanishing. A poem is made of the same stuff, since its words are gone from our ears as soon as we have read them. The reader ends up in the speaker's position, "marking time" with every line and listening for the knock.