Everything in Dave Bonta's poem is hushed, slow and half-visible, even though the setting is a ship crossing the stars. A worn-out vessel hangs in the dark while the laws of ordinary space give way around it. Its passengers are convicts, asleep. The only person awake is the chief engineer, also a convict, who sits in an empty lounge and murmurs lines of French poetry to himself. The poem's central idea is that time, which is the convicts' real sentence, can be put to use through attention and language, even when the universe itself is changing shape.
The title, "Usage du temps" ("the use of time"), works like a question laid over the scene. What do you do with time when it is the thing you are serving? The poem answers through its one waking figure. The ship does the traveling, the sleepers pass the hours unconscious, and only the engineer chooses to spend his time on a book.
The diction does a lot of the work. "Transport ship" is an ordinary technical phrase, but "transport" also carries the old sense of convicts being shipped away, so the future setting is shadowed by something very old. The "aging" ship adds to this: the poem's technology is tired and secondhand, not gleaming. Then comes the phrase "the Newtonian surface of what / they still sometimes call outer space". Newton's physics describes space as a stable, measurable stage, and here that stage "dissolves." The vague "they" and the words "still sometimes" make our everyday vocabulary seem to be outliving the reality it describes, as though the language has not caught up with where the ship has gone. The poem never explains this, and the reader is left to infer that the ship is moving by means that break the familiar rules.
The structure suits the subject. The poem is free verse with no rhyme, and its short, plain lines move at an unhurried pace. It is only two sentences long, and the second runs from "The smallest of shudders" all the way to the final book title. Inside that long sentence, a comma after "convicts" joins two separate events: the shudder passing through sleeping bodies and the constellations changing on a monitor. The comma lets them happen almost at once, as if the vast change outside and the small tremor inside were a single event. The line breaks add suspense. "Of what" ends a line and leaves us hanging before "they still sometimes call outer space" arrives. Soft sounds, as in "smallest of shudders" and "sleeping bodies," keep the tone quiet.
Notice, too, how often the poem hedges. The lounge is "almost-deserted" and the whisper is "almost inaudible." The word "almost" appears twice, and both times it leaves a thin trace of presence: one more person than none, one more sound than silence. The poem is interested in these faint remainders, the last bit of life in an emptied room. Even the "&" instead of "and" feels like a small, hurried, human mark on a cold scene.
The ending is the most telling choice. The poem stops on the title of the book the engineer is reading, *Transparence of the World*. The title of that book is a quiet answer to the dissolving space earlier in the poem. As the surface of the universe dissolves, the poem's last words point to a world made transparent by close attention. Jean Follain was a French poet known for brief poems about small, everyday things, and the choice of him is fitting. A poet of tiny objects is a good companion for a voyage through something immense. The poem does not tell us what the engineer is reading, only that he reads it softly, for no audience, with the sleepers beside him.
What makes the poem significant is how gently it joins science fiction and lyric poetry. Science fiction usually gives us spectacle: battles, discoveries, grand machinery. Bonta gives us a tremor, a monitor, and a whisper. The engineer is both prisoner and keeper of the ship, and his act of reading suggests that poetry is not a luxury for free people but something to hold on to when freedom is gone. The poem asks us to see that a person can be moved from place to place against their will and still choose how to spend their time.