oh orchid o'clock

The clock—its histories, oddities, dominance—is the mechanism of Endi Bogue Hartigan’s oh orchid o’clock. Hartigan sets the stage for an onslaught of simultaneity with the opening poem’s rush of epistrophe:

/it is the president’s turned up o’clock it is America’s deadliness and dailiness

o’clock / it is glued to the headline o’clock

 

it is lunchhour-beeline o’clock / it is it’s only Tuesday o’clock another

curbside memorial o’clock another caterpillar miracle o’clock another

 

people emptying from their lives o’clock or into

their lives o’clock the Nile floods the Nile floods every hotspell in this week

A series of short poems labeled “hour entry” consider devices from floral clocks to incense clocks, riff on terms like calendaring, and examine Frederick Winslow Taylor’s implementation of the stopwatch to the workplace. Throughout, the clock functions as an ongoing means of control in modern life, even while the speaker tries to “still the clock,” knowing “it is a kind of violence of fiction for the clock to not / function as a clock while others click and breathe and blink.” What would it mean to dismantle the clock, or rather, our relationship to it? In “hour entry: In Milwaukie, in 1908,” the mayor orders the destruction of jewelers’ public clocks and the result is “public fury.”

Hartigan’s interrogations expand into investigations of prayer and human consciousness as she participates in the curious histories of clocks. In “3 vows after King Phillip’s perpetual prayer machine,” imagined machines include a baton-twirling “electronic weather woman” who “would sense expectation patterns like weather,” and a tiny robot for a man’s ear that screams like “a combination of a fighting raccoon and an asthmatic gasp” before he spends “each penny.” As she evokes the timeless simultaneous information and activity our internet age allows, with its WebMD and newsfeeds and everything else searchable that is packed into these poems, the poet continues to make space for what is before and beyond our conceptions of time:

If I snap off the clock hands if I slice my fingerprint-finger, bending and snapping off the clock hands, leaving the bare white face of the clock, the galaxy would still contain this knocking around.