Keeping Time
Sept 9 2014


I am keeping time,
as time
slips just out of reach.

A leaky tap's
drip-drip-drip.
A finger, relentlessly jabbing
right between the eyes.
My heart, contracting
like a miraculous wind-up toy,
imperceptibly running down.

The sweeping hands
of the wall-clock,
endlessly circling
steadily keeping track.
Blinking digits, flitting past,
as if numbers
were inexhaustible.

Every cell of my body
contains its own molecular clock.
Strands of DNA
fraying, unravelling,
the metabolism
of night and day
synchronized by light.

I try to take
slow deep breaths.
Go back, in my head,
but time is inexorable,
propelling me on.

The hour chimes, cuckoo frets
steeple bell tolls,
wrist-watch, pocket-fob
always running slow.
And a ships' chronometer
among the many curiosities
in the old clock-maker's shop,
walls festooned, shelves crowded
counters overflowed.
On the hour, going-off
in tinkles, trills
jingle-jangles,
beeps and rings and blasts.
And a single hourglass,
silky sand
slipping through its narrow waist.

I try to keep time, accurately,
frantically grabbing
at this thing that has
no charge, or mass, or rate.

Direction
its only known quantity.

I try keeping time
as it slips out of reach.


We're surrounded by clocks. And even when we're not, the passage of time is pressing and unavoidable: the shortening days, the exigencies of meals and work and sleep. It's hardly original to observe that our modern lives are governed by time.

I was reading about contact made with another "lost" tribe in the Amazon, and thought about how our sense of time is so culturally determined, and how the concept of time might seem so very different for a small subsistence people like this. I was listening to a podcast about dinosaurs, and how a study of their long bones can -- like tree rings -- roughly determine age. Shortly after that I began to read a review of David Mitchell's new novel The Bone Clocks, and thought how his title resonated with what I’d just heard about actual bones and their biological clock. I recalled how molecular biologists can construct an evolutionary clock by comparing mutations in DNA, and how every cell has its own internal clock that governs its activity, as well as its predestined senescence. A multitude of clocks, within and without. There are very few clock-makers left, and a clock these days (like most everything else!) is rarely worth repairing; but I nevertheless had this persisting image of an old shop full of beeping blinking chiming clocks, signalling the hour all at once. ...So it seemed as good a time as any to write something about clocks. And as you can see, some of those thoughts actually made it into the eventual poem!

I noodled around with taking time and biding time and saving time, and then the was struck with the paradox of "keeping" time: as if you could stop time long enough to hold it; as if the time you saved you'd get back in the end. So the irony of "keeping time" was my entry into the poem, and I let it take me by the hand from there.

There are lots of little touches I like in this poem. But I think the one that keeps working with each re-reading is the hourglass. I quite like how the detail and cacophony (believe me, I tried to get that word in there!) of that small crowded shop so unexpectedly gives way to this simple device, the sharp contrast of all that sound and busyness with the implied silence of "silky sand/ slipping through its narrow waist".