The Nursing Clock
In another era, someone never dared to eat a peach
Yet I am stirring swirls of forgotten chocolates in milk
Wondering whether it is wise to be perpetually late
Whether in another hour I might limp towards the bank
Write another pair of letters
Lift another set of weights
In another universe there was someone else
Equipped to weather pain that ambulates
From door to door
Like a pensioner eroding at a nursing home,
And then, I sometimes wonder
Whether I won’t be that wizened crone
Hobbling down the street on three legs in the evening
Like the riddle Oedipus exposed in Thebes
I would love to be the unforgiving viper
And taste the bitters of first disobedience
Dripping sweet like ambergris upon my tongue
I would love to found the scintillating science
Of reality arrested in the shadow of an afternoon
A life imprinted on the concrete of the master clock —
And once I saw two kindergarten children
Pressing outstretched palms like angel wings
Into a corner of solidifying slabs of clay
I walk over a trapezed chasm
And the ropes send blood into my barefoot toes
When all the world’s bandages have waltzed
Into the rhythms of these disembodied voices
Then I no longer worship all of Nietzsche’s dances —
I’d rather immolate upon a crag,
Or, like one innocent soprano, perish in a vault,
Than witness the demise of promised fairy stories
Gazing past the waning moon as it grows old
I look, and underneath these saturnine advances,
The hailstorms that scar my withered cheeks,
I apprehend the arias of the morning
Beckoning a mother to command this circus into labor
And impede the dawn of this black sadist sent by nature
Through a newborn sent in lieu of stopping time
Well—I am no trapeze dancer,
Nor am I a legend reinvented by some Jewish shrink
I am here to write another set of letters
Sprint in heels to all of my appointments
Occasionally dare to eat a peach
And when I will have understood this steady rake
Of wooden little trains
I will continue on to eat my peach
And dare to be unmade