4:09 PM

It is 4:09
and the world has stopped pretending.

One does not expect this
on a Wednesday afternoon,
not in the middle of the week,
not in the hour when errands multiply,
when engines should be coughing
at the intersection,
when some machine should be cutting stone
or tearing up the street
in the name of improvement.

But nothing.

No cars passing.
No delivery trucks.
No voices from the sidewalk.
No hammer, no leaf blower,
no dog announcing its grievance
to the indifferent sky.

No wind in the trees.
No rain beginning its argument
against the roof.
No child crying.
No radio from a neighbor’s porch.
No siren rehearsing catastrophe
from three blocks away.

Only the room.
Only the chair.
Only the small, pale square of afternoon
lying across the floor
as if someone had set it there carefully
and forgotten to come back for it.

I should be grateful.

Isn’t this what I have wanted,
all these years?
A little quiet.
A little mercy
from the machinery of the day.
A pause in the great American racket
of progress, traffic, commerce, repair,
the endless forcing of one thing
into another.

And yet I do not trust it.

Quiet has always seemed to me
less like peace
than preparation.

The held breath before bad news.
The glassy pause before rain.
The strange civility
of a room where no one has yet said
what everyone knows.

After quiet,
comes the storm.

After quiet,
the trucks return.
The men in orange vests
begin again with their drills.
The dogs remember themselves.
The phones light up.
The whole frantic world
takes back its claim
on the body.

Traffic.
Noise.
Obligation.
The bright little knives
of modern life.

The appointments.
The passwords.
The messages unanswered
but somehow still accusing.
The screen asking if I am still there.

Yes, I am still here.

Though increasingly
I am not sure
the world is.

Or perhaps this is the trick age plays:
not that the world grows quieter,
but that one is slowly removed from it.

First a frequency disappears.
Then a voice at the end of a table.
Then birdsong, perhaps,
or the soft consonants
in someone’s apology.

You nod more often.
You smile at the wrong moment.
You learn to live
inside a sentence
with half the words missing.

Maybe nothing is still.

Maybe the cars are passing.
Maybe the dog is barking.
Maybe a siren is dragging its red wound
through the afternoon,
and I am merely sitting here,
mistaking loss for peace.

That is possible.

It is 4:09.
The world is quiet.

Or I am.