While in the car this morning, I was listening to “The Writers Almanac w/ Garrison Keillor” on NPR. (I believe that the day I started to enjoy and appreciate NPR was the day I matured and became an adult.) Anyway, he recited a poem that really struck a chord with me; that made me think for this site. Let me present it to you now…
“The Hour” by Michael Lind, from Parallel Lives. © Etruscan Press, 2008. NOT reprinted with permission. (please don’t sue me)
The Hour
Maybe the moment recurs daily at six, when commuters,
freed from the staring computers,
elbow and bump in unsought intimacy on a station
platform with you, and frustration
rots what is left of your strength. Maybe the hour comes after
dinner, when televised laughter
seeps from a neighboring room; maybe the time is the dead of
night, when you ponder, instead of
dreaming. Whatever the time, you will escape it—by sinking
down with a book, or by drinking
secretly out in the dark studio, or by unbuckling
pants on a stranger, or chuckling,
one with a mob, in a deep theater. Soon, though, the hour
comes to corrode all your power,
pleasure and faith with the damp dread that it daily assigns you.
How you evade it defines you.
I believe that the time I spend doing my “little projects”, such as this site, that is how I escape the “the hour”. And I wonder, how does this define me?
