This is an older piece considerably reworked.
A poem in search of a title.
A car passes down the wet road;
light slides over my curtains.
I watch the arrow fly across my room,
then night resumes. The glow of numbers
at my side, tells the long dark down to day.
Fitful, I hear the soft insistence of my heart
and tides of breath beat out their span,
per second, per second.
I shake my hand, deadened by my body’s weight,
to feel the loosed blood thrill again.
Its stone plinth, fast rooted,
gnomon aligned to the earth’s tilt,
the bronze dial turns towards the sun,
measures and enumerates its unclouded passage,
shadows the hours, the pulse of seasons- years.
Flies butt and buzz,
eyes flash, fail and dim,
birds flit, clouds drift, sands shift,
leaves flicker, grasses sway, seas lap
and rivers run under the apparent journeys of the sun.
A sere leaf taps my shoulder,
a bird-abandoned bough quivers,
Leaf- and petal-fall, moon in thrall,
the wind’s melody stroked from swung chimes,
all evaluate the same equations.
When all I am is stilled,
senses nullified, pitched into silence,
I will no longer know these soft flickers,
flights of time, nor mind the chiding of decay
that moulders me to other lives.
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