Flux

I see something of God in each hour of the twenty-four.

— Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

In the dark acreage of the house

a whole hill of love prevents the roof

from collapsing. Birds tinge the fringes

of my dreaming. It’s the primordial first hour

before I remember my own face or whereabouts,

when there’s more elegy than light.

Lying there in the semidark,

the woozy second hour,

I try to remember what my life has taught me.

When I peer through the living room window,

I see a younger version of myself

so luminous it makes me pause and really see it

how he’s making use of the world as if not using it.

The discordant third hour flies apart

as the exhaustive free jazz of summer

plays until my mind turns on itself.

In the ear-giving

fourth hour,

I think of what’s growing

out of my infant daughter’s listening:

the third movement of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony,

an apple dropping in the yard

the clock above her crib no longer ticking.

In the allusive fifth hour,

a wind plays the fringe of oak trees along the hedgerow.

Here, I’m more sack of sand on the levee

than Rimbaud’s Sleeper in the Valley ,

more idle yodler than Flaubert

moaning in the solitude of his room at Croisset.

In the world-weary

sixth hour,

I clearly see the legs of youth sticking out from under a heavy stone.

In the derelict seventh hour,

I want flesh

that can endure the rain

the cold

the heat.

Who skinned humanity?

Who turned us into smoldering sores?

I spend some of the wizardly eighth hour with my nephew

showing him three stones:

one from Campobello Island,

one from the bottom of the Grand Canyon,

and one from my left kidney.

In the bizarre ninth hour,

I’m Matsuo Bashō with a camera

shooting macro in a stand of milkweed:

a lip’s length away

from blue beetles,

Oleander aphids,

and lonely weevils.

In the wistful tenth hour,

I’m thinking of another hour

when I ate bread and pickles

under Scotch pines

and the thoughts in my head

that shouldn’t have been there.

The wolfish eleventh hour

finds my dog hard

on the trail of ecstasy.

It takes her three days to get back home.

In the terrifying twelfth hour,

faces are never put away forever.

They tumble out of cluttered closets

or startle me in the garden.

Under the scrutiny of the thirteenth hour,

my mother asks if I’m a “junkie.”

In the fog of the drug

I hear, “commie”

and reply: “absolutely not.”

In the stagnant fourteenth hour,

my wife is the pimiento in the olivegreen

pond.

In the furious fifteenth hour,

my nephew’s fist burdens the wall.

My neighbor will see him later on

stunning himself against the horizon

like a tiny bug hitting a windshield.

In the bookish sixteenth hour,

I loaf next to the sea in my head.

I keep peering into a world of erasures,

but I can remember smelling Menelaus’s dead seal skin

and the ambrosia under his nostrils,

the tobacco smoke from Captain Ahab’s pipe

before he tossed it into the sea,

and the stench of sulphur in Nemo’s saloon

as the Nautilus propelled through volcanic seas.

In the clocklike seventeenth hour,

each minute comes with its own liner notes

short on revelation.

In the mindful eighteenth hour,

a serene repose.

I know things

on my back

at night.

In the cosmic nineteenth hour,

Pluto is no longer just a blip in a textbook

with arrows pointing at it,

but a contrastive body

out there in the darkness.

In the shaky twentieth hour,

my head on a pillow

a home growing all around me

with ample windows and doors left wide open

for the forest

for my thoughts

for the renouncer in me.

In the beer-soaked

twenty-first

hour,

I’m made sad by the boy I barely remember being,

losing him in so much space and time,

in so much muck and honey.

In the disheveled twenty-second

hour,

the oft-repeated

phrase of my youth returns:

Your shoes are untied .

An incurable truth.

Was it meant to strike fear in my heart?

Was my mother a chaos theorist?

When she moodily lumbered from room to room,

was she trying to figure out why the universe

didn’t immediately annihilate itself?

Did she interrupt her nightly reading

of Danielle Steele’s Season of Passion

to ponder my unstable granny knot?

In the tender twenty-third

hour,

if I were to turn on the harsh bedroom light

and help my wife out of bed,

I would see the ugly rhizome and lateral shoots,

but leaving her there, unblanketed

in the moonlight,

all I see are leaves and flowers.

At last, in the inconclusive twenty-fourth

hour,

how many cracks of dawn are there,

how many suns and moons, fires and waters,

how many stones and untold hours?

What else can we do, but diddle away time

at the kitchen table every morning

and wait for that light to burnish the dark acreage again,

show us the ranging hills,

a hundred paths,

and a love we haven’t learned yet?

Andrew Morris lives in the Catskill Mountains of New York State where he teaches high school English and history. His work has appeared in Redivider, Ruminate Magazine, Otis Nebula, and is forthcoming in Rufous City Review. He’s also a member of the Poetry Workshop at Bright Hill Press in Treadwell, NY.