Big Clock

When the big clock at the train station stopped,

the leaves kept falling,

the trains kept running,

my mother’s hair kept growing longer and blacker,

and my father’s body kept filling up with time.

I can’t see the year on the station’s calendar.

We slept under the stopped hands of the clock

until morning, when a man entered carrying a ladder.

He climbed up to the clock’s face and opened it with a key.

No one but he knew what he saw.

Below him, the mortal faces went on passing

toward all compass points.

People went on crossing borders,

buying tickets in one time zone and setting foot in another.

Crossing thresholds: sleep to waking and back,

waiting room to moving train and back,

war zone to safe zone and back.

Crossing between gain and loss:

learning new words for the world and the things in it.

Forgetting old words for the heart and the things in it.

And collecting words in a different language

for those three primary colors:

staying, leaving, and returning.

And only the man at the top of the ladder

understood what he saw behind the face

which was neither smiling nor frowning.

And my father’s body went on filling up with death

until it reached the highest etched mark

of his eyes and spilled into mine.

And my mother’s hair goes on

never reaching the earth.

Source: The Invention of the Darling (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2024)