Clock

The dining room clock picks its teeth
as we eat. Above our talk of poetry
it chants, Ink blot! Ink blot!
Huge as a railway station dial, it snipes,
Be worried. It's almost too late.
How can you just sit there?
Defiantly, we raise glasses to lips which sip
the present moment again and again,
insist that time well passed
lives in later time. When the hour chimes,
that silver echo holds through
twenty seconds. The tick is
one large drop, one small, falling from
branch to lily pond. I see a woman
with a limp climbing stairs —
a persistence inside the wavering,
her mind poised between each
new step and the last.
The clock face is cracked enamel,
smoke-blackened by a century.
It knows what is unsaid,
listens to the sound of itself thinking.
Sometimes, silences before it
remembers to beat —
heart-pauses,
a circumspection before
the fact of time.