Thirteen words, no punctuation, not a single capital letter: Dave Bonta's "Nowness" is small enough to read in a few breaths, yet it tries to hold something we can never quite grasp. Its central idea is that the present is all time ever is, and that this present is too fragile and too quickly replaced to count as solid. The title's suffix matters here. "-ness" turns a passing moment into a state, something you might possess. The poem then shows, line by line, why you can't.
The opening couplet states the thought as a paradox. "time is only / one second old" makes time, which we normally picture as vast and ancient, almost newborn. The word "only" works in two ways, helped by the line break. Read on its own, "time is only" sounds like a definition: time is nothing but. Continued into the next line, it becomes a diminishing word: time is merely one second old. Both readings point the same way. Whatever has already passed no longer exists, so time is always as young as the moment we are standing in.
Then the poem turns from statement to image: "a print on water." The choice is clever because a print is a mark made by pressing, such as a footprint, a fingerprint or an inked page. Water is the one surface that cannot keep a mark. Press on it and for an instant you see a dimple, then the surface closes over it. That is the present as the poem sees it: the contact between us and the world, visible for a moment and then gone. The image also avoids the familiar picture of time as a flowing river. Here it is the impression that matters, not the current, and that makes the loss feel more immediate.
The final line, "the present draft," is the most layered. A draft is an unfinished version of a piece of writing, one that expects revision, so the present becomes something provisional, always about to be corrected by the next second. But "draft" also means a current of air, felt rather than seen, passing through and never staying. And judging by the water in the previous line, there may be a third echo in the way a boat's draft measures how deeply it sits in the water. That one is my inference, but the poem does little to discourage it. "Present" adds one more ambiguity, since it can be an adjective ("the present draft") or a noun, with "draft" then pulling against it. The line may even refer to the poem itself, which presents itself as only the current version.
The construction supports these meanings quietly. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, but the lines are tightly measured: roughly four, four, five and four syllables, short enough that each seems to come and go. The shape is a couplet followed by two single lines, each isolated by white space, as if every moment were fenced off from the next. The poem also contains only one verb. "is" appears in the first line, and after that the lines are fragments with nothing to drive them. Grammar fades the way the present does, and nothing is left to carry the sentence forward.
Sound does some work too. The long o of "only," "one" and "old" slows the opening, giving it a reflective hush. Then "print" and "present" share the same skeleton of p, r, n and t, so the last line sounds like an echo of the middle one, and the mark on the water turns into the present moment. "Draft" ends on a hard t, a sound that stops short, and with no full stop on the page the poem does not conclude. It simply ceases, which suits a poem about the impossibility of finishing a moment.
Its significance lies in that economy. Abstract ideas about time are usually delivered with weight and length, and here one paradox, one image and one punning word are enough. The poem asks the reader to feel what it describes: by the time you've understood the first line, the second it described is already gone, and each rereading becomes a fresh draft of the present.