Three lines of verse sit under a title that belongs to someone else. "Nel mezzo del cammin" are the opening words of Dante's *Inferno*, "in the middle of the journey", which goes on to say "of our life". Dante's speaker finds himself in a *selva oscura*, a dark wood where the true path is lost. Dave Bonta borrows that midlife moment and shrinks it. The wood is now "thin", and the dread has turned into something quieter and more wistful. The central idea is that middle age is not so much a plunge into darkness as a slow recognition that time is running low, and that we respond by promising ourselves a little wildness later.
The first line, "time is a thin woods", is a metaphor with no "like" to soften it. "Thin" does several jobs at once. A thin wood is sparse, so you can see daylight through the trunks and know roughly where the edge is. That is the opposite of Dante's impenetrable thicket. But "thin" also suggests thinning, as in hair, ice, or a supply that is wearing away. Time is both a place you walk through and a stock that is dwindling. The lowercase "time" and the missing punctuation make the poem seem to start mid-thought, which suits a title about being in the middle.
The second line brings in the speaker's voice, and it is a slightly shaky one. "I am sure I shall save" has the stiff confidence of a promise, helped by the formal "shall". But people tend to say "I am sure" when they are trying to convince themselves. The line break adds a twist. Stopping at "save" lets the word briefly mean *rescue*, which quietly recalls Dante's own story of being led out of the wood. Then "for one night" turns it into *set aside, reserve*. The speaker will not rescue the woods, or be rescued by them. He will keep them for a single night. There may even be a third, faint reading of "save for" as "except for", as if the whole of time were the woods apart from one night, though the more natural sense is to keep something in reserve.
That final phrase is where the poem's humour and sadness meet. Dante's journey takes him through the whole of the afterlife. Bonta's speaker plans one night, a tiny and almost domestic allotment of adventure. It is easy to imagine this as a modern person's compromise, a bit of wilderness scheduled in the way we schedule a weekend away. The poem does not say whether the night will ever come. "Shall" points at the future and nothing in the text delivers it.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme, and the lines taper in length, roughly five syllables, then six, then three. The short last line lands softly, like a door being closed. The stresses bunch up in "thin woods", two heavy beats together, so the metaphor feels dense even though the image is of something sparse. Long *i* sounds run through the poem: "time", "I", "I", "night". This gives it a quiet internal echo and links the first word to the last. We begin with an abstraction and end with a specific, dark, countable unit of it. The soft *s* and *sh* sounds of "sure", "shall" and "save" give the middle line a hush, as if the speaker is half-whispering a resolution.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does by compression and contrast. By setting a tiny, modern thought beneath one of the most famous openings in literature, Bonta invites the reader to feel the difference in scale. Dante's crisis is cosmic and moral. Here it is personal and small, and perhaps more recognisable for that. Most of us do not lose the path in a terrifying forest. We look up and notice the trees are fewer than we thought, and we tell ourselves we will walk among them properly one day soon. The poem is a gentle joke at the speaker's expense, and it is also a quiet warning to the reader about putting things off.