Imperial

Darkly Shifting Flux

10 darkly shifting flux At noon I teach my summer school class, during which some significant Middle English poems on the subject of mortality are strenuously appreciated for one hour and fifty minutes. After that I swim about half-a-mile under a series of cloudy metaphors at the public pool, and then I bike home. Now it’s 3 o’clock, and the next scheduled event of the summer is dinner at 6:30. I am in my house, my domestic setting, with my furniture. We exist together in the dining room for a moment, the breakfront, the table, the buffet, and I. How lucky we are to be here, so stable and serene, in the darkly shifting flux of the cosmos. And there in the backyard is my wife, kneeling amid her conflagration of perennials. My wyf. Clad in that fossil syllable, yet so vivid and alive under the sun. It is still 3 o’clock, and it seems like maybe the day is stuck; it’s bumped into something just below the surface, and there’s no way of getting from here to the next scheduled event except to call to her through the open window, and put my arms around her when she comes in, and taste the sweat on her neck, her inchoate saltiness, 11 and then let one of us, or it could be both of us, lead the slow, breathing, animal bodies up the stairs to the cool darkness, and take off the tethers and harnesses, remove the reins and halters, and just let them gallop off into that green clearance for awhile. ...