Mark Strand

I'm still trying to figure out why Mark Strand is good. He's growing on me the more I read. This poem is pretty simple in some respects. But he captures these ideas so well:

Hour

The extra hour given back to eternity
The hour gained by travelling west
The hour of the imagined smpire
The deepest hour of the darkest sea
The guilty hour that precedes catastrophe
The hour that is takes to go from here to there
The haunted hour of the knowledge of death
The hour in which the moon darkens
The hour that moves through the mind like cloudshadow
The blue hour that rests on the rroof of the house

The hour that is the mother of minutes and grandmother of seconds
The swollen hour of pain, enough, enough
The hour when mice run in the walls
The bronze hour of electrical weather
The cloistered hour of the nun's great moment
The necklace of hours the widow wears
the numbing hour of a night in Nome
The sound of hours in the breathing of plants
The central hou that exists without you
The hour in which the universe begins to die

The hallucinatory hour that hangs forever
The hour of excess that equals two hours of self-examination
The hour that flashed on the skin
The hour of final music
The hour of painless solitude
The hour of moonlight upon her body

today

I listened to people today.
To the secretary who considers switching jobs.
To the co-worker who is much older than I am.
To the socially awkward bachelor from church.
To the giggley friends with their linseed oil stories.
To the mechanic whose accent was better than my best imitation.

It's nice to have the time to stop
and listen to people.

ahhhh

At long last

I'm done with undergrad!