He marks the days the way a man marks time in a sentence —
one hash mark at a time, with the particular penance
of the hours being there to be inhabited and discharged.
The calendar of numb runs from the small to the enlarged.
Five and two: the ancient inventory of the working life,
the structure that the social lecture
of civilization built around the human need for rhythm.
He follows the rhythm ’cause there’s nothing underneath or with him
that would fill the rhythm with a different music of its own —
so he marches to the beat he’s given in the time he’s known.
The work days have their shape:
the morning’s coffee and the entry, the corridor,
the sentinels at the sentry
of the open-plan arrangement with its hum and its low-grade noise.
He moves through all of it without the use of much internal voice.
Internal voice requires something worth the saying to itself,
and the saying mostly puts itself back on the shelf
before it finds a sentence.
It’s a half-formed kind of thinking —
a murmur and a motion
in the space between the blinking.
The weekend is a different kind of numb,
more open, less defined.
The structure falls away and leaves the unscheduled to find
its own level in the hours like water in a vessel —
and the water is the numb, and the numb settles to the vessel.
He watches sports, he mows the grass, he does the grocery run,
he answers the accumulated texts and calls, and when it’s done
he settles to the couch with the particular evening quality
of a weekend done — a man at rest, officially.
The holidays insert themselves with their particular requirement —
the gathering, the ceremony, the obligatory deployment
of festivity and warmth — and he provides what’s asked —
the adequate performance and the seasonal well-tasked.
He finds the holidays the hardest of the calendar’s occasions —
not from grief or longing, but from the gentle abrasions
of being asked to feel something specific on a schedule —
the numb doesn’t follow schedule and the calendar is feudal.
The year turns over in the calendar the way all years do —
the ball drops somewhere on the screen and the year begins its new
arrangement of the same three hundred sixty-five —
and the man receives the new year in the numb, alive
enough to note the number and to update the phone’s display
and to go to bed in the new year the same as the old year’s way —
the calendar of numb administers the year without pause,
and the man inside the calendar observes its usual laws.
The calendar of numb has run for years beyond the counting,
each year a repetition with the incremental mounting
of the days — and the days are fine, the days are adequate and even —
and the calendar of numb is the life the man is living.
The numb keeps the calendar and the calendar keeps the numb —
they run together through the year like a paired, obligated sum —
and the man at the center of the calendar’s administration
is the numb, and the numb is the man, and the year’s the destination.
He keeps the calendar on the wall beside the kitchen window —
the old-fashioned paper kind with its boxes and its lingo
of the numbered and the dated, the X marks on the passed —
a man who marks his passage with the calendar aghast
at nothing, marking nothing, just the neutral record of the going —
the calendar of numb, the daily habit of the showing
that the days were here and had their tenure and departed —
the calendar of numb, and the man who started.