Three small panels sit side by side in "Four O'Clock": a scene, a set of instructions, and a story. Together they ask what children really need to learn, and what is lost when they are taken away from the place where they were learning it.
The first panel is a picture with no main verb in it. Nothing is said to happen. There are "two children swimming / among ten thousand salmon," and the sentence just floats there, like the children in the water. The setting is marked by a mix of the natural and the churchly: "summer equinox," "breviaries," the "bell tone of vespers." Breviaries are the books of daily prayer, so the hour is measured by ritual and season, not by a clock. Strictly speaking, equinoxes fall in spring and autumn, so "summer equinox" is an odd phrase. Perhaps the poem is blurring its calendar on purpose, but that is my reading, not something the text says. The contrast in scale is the real point. Two small bodies and ten thousand fish suggest a world so abundant that the children are guests in it rather than owners.
The second panel turns that picture into a wish. "teach the children" is an order, but the lessons are not skills so much as permissions. The word "that" appears twice on its own line, and each time it opens a belief the children should be given. One is that a trout "interested in taking chances / will kiss their fingers." The other is that "in a summer solstice / bees land on their nose." The humor is gentle, and the trout is almost flirtatious. What the children are being taught is stillness, patience and trust. You catch a fish with your hands only by not grabbing, and a bee will settle on your nose only if you don't flinch. The kind of knowledge on offer here is a relationship with living things.
The third panel, the one marked "for Diane Wakoski," drops the lyrical mood for flat storytelling. "a boy went far from his home / dug a hole / lived in it mornings / watching deer." The contradiction is neat. He leaves home and then makes one out of dirt. Even the landscape is stripped back, with "no trees around / for thirty miles," yet the boy is clearly content, and watching deer is his whole occupation. Then comes the sting: "when he was completely at home / he was sent away to school." The poem gives no reason and no comment, and that restraint makes it hit harder. The word "school" lands like a verdict.
Placed against the second panel, it turns into an argument. The poem's "teach" belongs to fingers, fish and bees. The boy's "school" belongs to somewhere else, and it arrives exactly when his real education, patient attention to deer, has taken root. The title may add to this. Four o'clock is an afternoon hour, and in many places about when a school day ends, though the poem never says so. If that is what it means, the title points to the bell that lets children out, while the poem imagines what they might do if no one rang it at all.
The form backs this up. There is no punctuation and no capital letters, and the lines are short, with the words set down like objects. There is no rhyme, but there are small echoes. "Summer," "solstice," "salmon" and "swimming" share their soft s sounds, which gives the first two panels a drowsy, warm feel. In the third, "home" and "hole" sit close in sound, so the hole almost becomes the home before our eyes. The rhythm also changes. The first two panels are quick, light fragments. The last line is longer and plainer, and it ends the poem with a thud.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it says out loud. It never calls school cruel or nature kind. It sets abundance against emptiness, a group of children against a lone boy, and an open-ended lesson against a sudden removal, and then lets the reader do the judging. It also leaves a small, stubborn question behind: what would it mean to be taught how to be at home?