Six lines, three couplets, and a title borrowed from a famously enormous novel: Dave Bonta's "Remembrance of things past" fits a huge subject into a very small room. The title is the English name long given to Proust's *À la recherche du temps perdu*, a book about recovering vanished years through memory. The opening question, "where is our lost / and laced-up time," is a pocket-sized version of Proust's "lost time." But where Proust sends his narrator on a vast search, Bonta's speaker gets two scraps of memory, and the poem's interest lies in what those scraps turn out to be.
The question has no question mark and no capital letter, so it sounds less like a formal inquiry than something muttered. The line break matters too. "Lost" ends the first line and stands for a moment as a noun, "our lost," as if the loss itself were the thing being held up. Then comes the odd phrase "laced-up." It could mean tied tight like a boot, buttoned into propriety, or neatly packaged and put away. Lace is also a delicate fabric, and that meaning pays off later. The word "our" makes the lost time shared, which quietly prepares for the confession in the second couplet.
That confession arrives flatly: "we broke up / about matters of money." The speaker answers the grand question with a squabble. Even the verb carries a pun, since "broke up" sits right beside "money," and being "broke" is its own kind of lost. "Matters" is a small joke as well, because the things that matter here are the least romantic ones. The line "we broke up" is complete in itself, so the break in the line is the break in the relationship. There is no madeleine and no golden afternoon, only the memory of an argument. The poem seems to suggest that this is what memory actually hands us.
The last couplet changes direction. "Intricate as an ear" is a strange, precise simile, and a bodily one. An ear is all folds and spirals, and the inner ear is even called a labyrinth. It is also the organ of listening, which is a pointed image in a poem about a break-up, though that link is my inference rather than something the poem states. The syntax stays open. Perhaps the wife is the intricate one, or perhaps she was inside some space as complicated as an ear. The poem also never says whether the "we" who broke up includes her. The past tense "was" hints that she is no longer there. The poem ends on "within," a preposition with nothing after it, so the reader is left inside the unfinished thought. "Lace" also returns here, because lace is intricate, and the opening image and closing image turn out to be related.
The form is bare. The lines run from three to six syllables, there is no rhyme, and there is no punctuation at all. Sound does the work that rhyme usually does. "Lost" and "laced" share their opening and closing consonants. "Matters," "money" and "my" form a chain of m sounds that links the quarrel to the speaker's wife. "Intricate" and "within" echo each other with the same "in," bracketing the final couplet. Each couplet also moves the poem inward. It starts with an abstraction (time), moves to an event (a break-up), and ends in the body (an ear). The poem narrows toward a person, and then toward the inside of a person.
What makes it worth reading is that it tests a monumental literary idea against ordinary life. If lost time comes back at all, the poem implies, it comes back in small, unglamorous pieces, such as an argument about money. Behind the argument is a person who stays as intricate and unreachable as the inside of an ear. The tone is wry and aching at once, and the poem never settles which feeling wins. It asks where lost time has gone and gives an answer that is both comic and sad. The answer is partial, and the poem leaves it that way.