A whole life, over by evening. In Dave Bonta's «Fleeting», that idea fits into roughly sixteen syllables, two short stanzas and not a single punctuation mark. The poem sets a huge subject, the brevity of human existence, against a very small and physical moment: a speaker short of breath, searching the air for birds.
The first stanza states the idea almost carelessly. "our whole lives passing / in one day" is a fragment with no main verb, as if the thought arrived half-formed and the speaker didn't stop to finish it. The grammar is slightly odd and rewards a second look. It says "lives", plural, but "day", singular, so every one of us is folded into the same twenty-four hours. The verb form matters too. The lives are "passing", not "passed", so the loss is happening now, as we read. The word also carries its everyday meaning of dying, though the poem never says so. The poem never explains why a life should feel like a day. Judging by the title, the point is simply how quickly everything goes.
Then comes the turn. "all out of air" is an ordinary idiom for being breathless, and the poem leaves the cause open. It could be running, panic, grief or the sheer vertigo of the thought in the first stanza. Notice how the poem handles its big words. "whole" in line one and "all" in line three are both totalising, but they point opposite ways. The first describes everything contained in a day, and the second describes everything drained from the speaker. The stanza break between them works like the breath the speaker can't take.
The last line is the poem's only finite verb: "I look for crows." Everything before it is participle and fragment, a state of affairs with nobody acting inside it. Only here does someone do something, and what they do is small and a little strange. The pronoun matters as well. The poem moves from the shared "our" to a single "I", and the upright capital is the only one in a poem otherwise in lowercase. After a thought about all of humanity, one person is left looking.
Why crows? The poem doesn't say, and that silence is part of its power. We can only infer. Crows are creatures of the air, so they have exactly what the speaker has run out of. In many traditions they are also birds of omen and death, so the speaker may be looking for a sign, or for a witness. They are also common, noisy, everyday birds, so the glance may simply be a reach for something ordinary and alive. Notice, too, that the speaker "look[s] for" crows rather than seeing them. The poem ends before we learn whether they appear, and with no full stop, it doesn't so much finish as stop.
The sound and shape of the poem support this. There is no rhyme, but there is a quiet echo of the long "o" in "whole" and "crows", which links the opening thought to the closing image. The rounded vowels in "all out of" make the mouth form something like a gasp. The line lengths fall from five syllables to three, then settle at four and four. "in one day" is three weighty, nearly equal beats, and the shortness acts out the idea that a day is all we get. The poem has haiku-like compression and a nature image at its close, but it doesn't follow the 5-7-5 pattern, and it doesn't need to.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it trusts the reader. It doesn't tell us how to feel about mortality. It gives us one enormous claim, one physical symptom and one odd action, and lets us supply the connections. The result is a poem that is over in seconds but hard to leave. Reading it, you may find you have held your own breath.