I’m in bed with one eye open
on a gloomy morning,
the room as shadowy as the one
in Larkin’s wake-up poem,
and the light between the drapes
as grey as Whistler’s sideways mother.
But once I slip into my Hawaiian slippers,
I sense an uptick about to occur,
perhaps caused by 3 oranges in a bowl,
or a man out for a run
with his pug hurrying behind
as I pull open the blinds in the front room.
It could be the lemon tree
bowing under the weight of lemons
that I see when swimming on my back,
or the big photo of Harriet Tubman
on a billboard everyone sped by,
or that skeleton of a rabbit
you pointed to one afternoon
in the dune grass with the surf crashing away.
Eventually, this thing or that
will get the day rolling
on the parallel rails of another month.
Then off we go, Mr. Wednesday and I,
waving as we slip around these many curves,
him a central feature of every future week,
me with one less day to live—
like Philip Larkin sitting up in bed,
alone and startled, his wall calendar in flames.