In 1967, one second was defined as nine-billion,
one-hundred-ninety-two-million, six-hundred
-thirty-one-thousand, seven-hundred-and-seventy
vibrations of a cesium atom—cesium, a bluish-gray
ductile metal, the most electropositive of all metals.

This is here and now. Where I am two cones
of time meet in a single uncontrollable shudder
of an atom, the cone below widening into a past

of infinite causes; the cone above, into possibilities
equally uncountable. With this in mind, I will
speak of Captain Midnight, a man of infinite jest.

When he sleeps, his sleep is brief but fierce. Often
his own voice wakes him, his voice in a gruff
monotone crying "Mercy" or "No thank you.

Not at this time, good sir." Waking, his eyes are
closed. Still wrapped in the bearskin of sleep
he lurches to the door, raises the latch, and shoves

against the snowdrift on the sill. The world doesn't
begin with sweaty Titans, old bearded men costumed
in pumped-up brawn. And it isn't the musicians

fumbling in the dark with no one to turn their pages.
Nor is it the switch-throwing technicians. A thin
drizzle of static on a black screen, this is how

it begins, climbing note by note out of the utter
silence to a vertical white chord. The door is
cracked. Behold the sunlit snow. The Captain

draws breath and asks who he has been before
this day began. Seventeen-ninety-two was a year
not greatly different from others. Shelley and

Rossini were born, and the guillotine was set up
at the place du Carrousel, and—on December 22—
while hunting on Sagar Island south of Calcutta

a Mr. Munrow was seized by a tiger. The drooling
jaws gripped his head, dragging him into a cover
of bamboo and dracaena, but, the officers of the party

discharging their pieces, Munrow was dropped
and borne to safety, whereupon the ship's surgeon
swabbed his punctured skull with alcohol. There lies

my friend—the words as yellow and useless as
the epaulettes on his coat, tossed onto his sea-chest
with the other clothes he will not wear again:

the shammy breeches, the white stockings, and
the silk waistcoat on which his daughter Pera
embroidered columbines, daisies, forget-me-nots.

In her tidy house, in Highgate or Primrose Hill,
Pera cradles her baby, the Captain's grandson,
who, teething, has cried for hours, and now

he nightingale does his stuff. Half a world away,
Midnight Munrow is ending one gentlemanly life.
For days the copper sea rocks him. His fellows

arrange him on the deck towards evening. They
say nothing. Pink gulls lazy overhead, saying
nothing. He will eat nothing, drink nothing,

poised at a point where the cone above his head
holds nothing. Cornwallis and Tippoo Sahib,
the contraption in the place du Carrousel,

and the little house in Hampstead or on
the Brompton Road are phantasmagoria
he can brush off when he awakes.

Between two infinites, the blue-gray atom
freezes. The door is cracked inside the broken
head. And at that moment, which cannot

be called a moment, the Captain tells me,
she—his daughter—kneels beside him, unfurls
her full chemise, gives him her oozing breast.