Calling something "a matter of interpretation" is usually a way of ending an argument. Here the phrase starts one. Dave Bonta's poem is three lines long, written in lowercase with no punctuation at all, and it moves from a claim to two questions that it never tries to answer. Its central idea is that living is a form of interpreting: time, nature and knowledge all arrive as text, and no one hands us the key.
The first line is the only statement, and the only place the speaker says "I": "I am translating a library into hands." The ambition is almost comic. A library is the accumulated written thought of many people, silent on its shelves, and hands are what one person has to work with. Translation normally moves between languages, but here it moves between media, from page to body, from reading to touching, making and gesturing. The title nudges us toward one reading, since "interpretation" can also mean sign-language interpreting, though that is an inference and the poem never says it. Whichever way we read it, the verb is progressive. The speaker is *translating*, not finished, and a task this size cannot be finished. Ten fingers against a whole library suggests that something is always lost, and also that something is always made.
Then the speaker disappears and the questions arrive: "is time a prison or a garden." Both are enclosed places, so the difference lies not in the walls but in what happens inside them. In a prison, time is something done to you. In a garden, time is something you work with, a matter of seasons, patience and growth. The word "hands" from the first line seems to linger here, since gardens are tended by hands and prisoners are often robbed of theirs. The "or" sets up a tidy choice, but the title warns us not to trust tidy choices. The same hours could be either, depending on how we read them.
The third line, "are trees letters to the night," makes the poem's best move. "Letters" works two ways, as characters of an alphabet and as messages sent to someone. Trees were presumably already hovering in the poem, because a library is made of them (paper) and a garden is full of them. The image brings the poem back to its starting point. Judging by the imagery, bare branches against a dark sky could look like handwriting, and the night becomes a vast, silent addressee who may never answer. Where the first line turned writing into hands, this one turns the living world into writing, so translation runs in both directions.
The form carries the same uncertainty. The lines are not rhymed and there is no regular meter, but the poem is held together by quieter echoes. "Time" and "night" share a long *i* sound, which also echoes the opening "I," so the speaker's voice is faintly present at the end even though the pronoun is gone. The soft *t* and *l* sounds in "translating," "letters," "time," "trees" and "night" give the lines a gentle, tapping texture, like fingers on a page. The lines also thin out as they go, from a statement with a long, Latinate verb to a short, plain question. Because the questions have no question marks, they never rise in the usual way. They hang in the air as if the speaker were thinking aloud and not demanding a reply.
What makes the poem worth a student's time is how much it asks of the reader in so little space. Each line is itself an act of interpretation, a metaphor that translates one thing into another: books into hands, time into a place, trees into mail. We end up doing what the speaker does, weighing images and deciding what they mean. The poem refuses to say whether time is a prison or a garden, and that refusal is its point. It ends on "night," an open and unreadable word, and leaves us with the task the title promised.