THE CLOCK                                                                                                  

Staying with friends in the North-West, the Lakes,

a morning garden date with peckish feathered guests

drawn by delicacies half hidden by spring’s fresh leaves

which sway a little in the breeze and so appeal as

easy meals to songbirds darting here and there

which I watch, engrossed, from a kitchen chair.

 

And, in the peace of this house in the hills,

I hear for the first time the tick and twin tock

of a clock, quite small, tacked on an empty stretch of wall,

the tick soft but sure – which I try but find I can’t shut out.

When it’s quiet, I can set the pace for a day or a minute,

measure it in my way, start it and end it.

 

What gets me most with these drab ticks and tocks is

their doggedness, their plodding on, despite the fact

that some things, say a kiss, beg time to go slow

while others, a lover’s absence say, pray that it flies.

Lives can be measured but not by the slice;

they may be appraised but they cannot be priced.

 

A life is but layers of pride, joy and pain,

the lessons of love, the passions, the shame,

of sleep and of dreams, some sweet but not all.

The view from my chair of these sing-song birds feeding

with the gold and green gorse on the hills draped behind

is not the straight course that the ticks have in mind;

 

it is life itself, make no mistake, it is more than

the coincidence – the birds’ and my being awake,

at the same spot, at the same time – it is the pot pourri of

all their days and all of mine; and tomorrow it will differ.

The tick of a clock has no part in this, no place –

I should wipe the smugness from its foolish face.

 

It may one day hold all the pictures and aces

while a conspiracy of circles by its thin arrowed hands

drive us all giddy into clock-free graves. But let’s not allow it to

start the march or lead the dance; let it be heard as

the rhythmic rub of a cartwheel hub, just a sound parasite,

on our meandering tracks to the last of the light.