Dunn: ‘The Last Hours’

 I should have mentioned in yesterday’s note that Stephen Dunn’s poem “The Hours” has a companion piece, at least in my mind.

“The Hours” is a meditation on the how time is spent — and how the worst way to spend it is to try to live by someone else’s time. When someone else is dictating your schedule, someone else is dictating your values.

The poem states a principle. If you want to know how the principle works in real life — in Dunn’s real life — try “The Last Hours.”

At 25, the poet was on a shaky corporate ladder, headed up. He knew then only what he didn’t want, which was what he had, a job with a company that sold snack food.

At 19 minutes to 5, the big boss summoned him to his office and offered him a real job, with money and an office — the one that had belonged to the exec that had just been fired.

            I smile, I say yes and yes and yes,

            but — I don’t know from what calm place

            this comes — I’m translating

            his beneficence into a lifetime, a life

            of selling snacks, talking snack strategy,

            thinking snack thoughts.

Joy seeps in. The young poet knows he will quit, that this phase of his life is over, that we will pass time in other ways.

• Source: Stephen Dunn, Different Hours; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010.