Few poems ask so little of a reader and give back so much as these four lines. Dave Bonta's "Time lines" has no punctuation, no capital letters, no rhyme and almost no event: someone is out in the summer, keeping company with corn and drinking milk. Yet the poem makes a quiet argument, that the present is not something that merely happens to us but something we can choose to accept, like a gift.
The opening line works as a doorway: "a present of the present". The same word appears twice, spelled and pronounced identically, with two meanings. The first is a gift, the second is *now*. Folding them together makes the moment itself the gift, and "of" suggests the gift is made out of the moment. No giver is named and no object is handed over, so the speaker must supply both sides of the exchange.
That is why the verb in the next line is so well chosen. "I take my time this summer" is an everyday idiom for not hurrying, but the poem lets it turn literal. Time can't be handed to you. You take it, the way you take a seat or a cup. The word "my" matters too, because the time is claimed, not borrowed. The final line repeats the pattern almost exactly: "I take my cup of new milk." Same verb, same possessive, so time and milk sit in the same grammatical slot. The abstraction of the first line becomes something you can hold and taste. "New" quietly echoes the freshness of the present, since each moment, like milk, is freshly drawn.
Between those two "I take" lines sits the corn: "the corn is good company". It is the only line without the speaker in it, as though the "I" steps aside to let the world speak. The personification is gentle. Corn is good company because it asks for nothing. It stands still, grows at its own pace, and is a perfect companion for someone learning to slow down. The phrase also shuts out any hint of loneliness, since being alone with the corn is described as being accompanied.
The construction is more careful than its plainness suggests. Counting syllables, every line comes to seven, which gives the poem a calm evenness without pinning it to a strict meter. Each line carries roughly three beats, and the last ends on two stressed words, "new milk", which hold the voice back. You can't rush those two syllables, and the poem ends with something close to a swallow. There is no end-rhyme, but the sound is knitted together all the same. The soft *m* hums through "time", "my", "summer", "company" and "milk", and "cup" shares its vowel with the first syllable of "company". The lack of punctuation matters as well. With no full stops, no line is sealed off from the next, and the present flows on without a boundary.
The title adds a pun. A timeline is a chart of events in order, past to future. This poem offers a timeline with a single point on it, and even that point, "this summer", is wide enough to hold a whole season. The "lines" are also lines of verse, so the poem's own length is the time it measures. It takes a few seconds to read, but it rewards a slow reading, and that is its point. The form enacts what the words recommend.
That match between form and message is what makes the poem worth studying. It shows how an old idiom can be revived by taking it literally, and how plain, concrete things such as corn and milk can carry an idea about time better than abstract statements could. It also shows how much a poem can do with very little, which is a useful lesson for anyone writing their own. Judging by the imagery, the poem sets a slower, ripening kind of time against the clock-and-calendar kind, and it leaves the reader to decide which they would rather be living in.