Time and Mortality
Time and mortality: it’s not that we don’t realize we’re all mortal, it’s that the reminder comes as a surprise. A glance in the mirror that reminds us, only vaguely, of a relative or long gone friend. A surprise when something we expected to continue on suddenly stops — for example, newpapers or magazines that decide to stop printing physical copoies and publish only on-line, if at all.
At the Cleveland Museum of Art, we recently viewed a 1879 memento mori by William Michael Harnett, “To This Favour,” from 1879. Momento mori (Latin for remember death) is a type of art that intends to remind the viewer of mortality.
My teen son thought it would make a great background for his phone. Because skull. Of course. “To This Favour” uses a skull, burned out candle, empty hourglass, and quote from Shakespear’s Hamlet to reinforce the idea that time has just about run out.
Side note: I’m posting this a day early because I’m off to Brazil tonight for ten days or so. So you’ll receive this out of the normal time sequence. Out of time…get it? Yeah, I know, I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist.
Anyway… Heavy handed imagery is fine for a painting. But in daily life, the signs are often more subtle. And then the little changes move just a bit more, and can no longer be ignored. That’s the topic of this week’s poem.
Out of Time
When my father, who had said only a handful
of sentences to my face or on the phone over
my entire lifetime, leaving it all to my mother,
who anyway was happy with the arrangement,—
she to be the one to wrestle ideas and the other stupid
things we kids came up with to the ground,
she to be the voice of decisions made,
disasters averted, or even averted and swept away
like clouds after a storm, she to be the reporter
(court or otherwise) and the investigator and jury and prison guard,
she to know where and when and who we went with and whether
we were Acceptable—
began to take the phone on Saturday night
and ask questions awkwardly though they were just simple questions—
how are you, what are the kids doing,
I hope we haven’t missed a birthday—
I knew we were marking days on a calendar of grief and endings,
days hardly intelligible one from the next,
the vast slow waiting hanging in the air humid with potential
and all such potential inevitable, just rhymes
out of time looking for their lines.
If you enjoyed Out of Time
You’ll find more of my poems on this blog or in the collection Stars Crawl Out From Their Caves, which is available in both ebook and print. Missed a poem of the week? Links to prior weeks are on this page.
Have a great week!