I

The filigreed watch case clicks open and inside
I find time’s intimate machinery:
the interlocking wheels’ circumference,
the pintoothed sprockets that still coincide,
even though the little self-important melody
that marked the subdivisions of the hour
is broken now, and mute.
Desolate of consequence,
the pocket watch’s innards look like our
old diagrams of the Ptolemaic heavens
with epicyclical and sweet-greased spheres
—except that Made in U.S.A. appears
etched on a satiny spring,
and George Evans
& Son, New York, glints up from another.

2

A second hand still whiskers the watch’s face
and staggers when I shake it in my fist.

The dark dials mutter like two summer bees
imprisoned in petals, and I feel them beat

—the ratchet of a rope let down into a well,
breathless and staccato and dis ...

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