Welcome Hardings’ Clocks & Music Boxes

When I walk in, the grandfather clocks are chiming at odd
               unsynchronized intervals.
With all their various tick-tockings, it’s like listening

               to a hundred leaky faucets fill
their porcelain wash basins until they spill over on the hour
               in a cascade of cable-wound

triple chimes. Each clock telling a different time, I feel
               like Einstein, or the March Hare
dipping his friend’s stopped pocket watch in a cup of tea.

               Time doesn’t matter
to the Mad Hatter & Co. It’s easy to kill an hour or two
               and forget my afternoon

appointment in this room where all times are more or less true.
               ”Tempus fugit,”
reads the motto on a pinch-waist grandfather clock

               whose brass lyre pendulum
hypnotizes me for a moment so I see my mother warning me
               not to procrastinate

over problems in long division or fractions,
               which I haven’t mastered
yet, or ever—my mother turned overnight from the girl

               in her wedding picture,
spit curls and a sassy don’t-you-dare-kiss-me pout of a mouth,
               to a seventy-year-old

woman with one breast left. Her face is crackle-glaze porcelain
               late Ming Dynasty.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “Everything always turns out for the best.”

               A cuckoo clock chimes
from the wall. Its four Tyrolean hand-painted peasants,
               two miniature couples,

revolve to a snatch of a waltz as the cuckoo comes out
               of her nest and nods
to each chime. Under their bell jars, the anniversary clocks

               maintain the monotonous
back and forth of their four brass balls. “They used to be wound
               once a year

and were unreliable,” the shop owner tells me. “Now, of course,
               they’re quartz
and never need winding.” They’re guaranteed to last a lifetime,

               never ‘to quiver
out of Decimals—into Degreeless Noon—’ To think that the delicate
               intermeshings of cogwheels

in the Swiss works of a gilded rococo cuckoo clock by Bulova,
               with a tolerance
of a few micromillimeters, will outlast my mother

               and, probably, me
is ridiculous, and comforting. The hour hand will keep creeping
               over the dial

of days, on which, although we do not see it,
               the snow melting off
a roof will trickle and tick down into a waterfall

               of icicles
honed to the cold blue fire of unclouded diamond.
               Everything will continue,

almost the same. The sky with its eumulous Rorschachs.
               The trampled confetti
of dogwood petals scattered on the sidewalk after the rain’s

               parade goes past,
twirling its batons of lightning. All the ecstasies
               of spray paint

on the railway trestle, I LOVE JACK
               or MARY GIVES GOOD HEAD,
which the highway department paints over once a year.

               Even the music boxes
which I wind to hear the thirty-six-note rolls of “Für Elise,”
                ”Memory,”

or Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” will keep playing their sentimental
               tunes. The porcelain
ballerina pirouettes on her pedestal to the strains

               of “Glair de Lune,”
while around and around go the wooden riderless horses
               of a candy-cane-striped

carousel to “Love Me Tender, Love Me True” inside
               a glass ball
which I shake to make it snow. Such kitsch is wonderfully

               incorrigible. All the different
melodies crisscross to the counterpoint of a hundred clocks
               ticking and chiming.

What a weird cacophony I get, so artificial it’s almost
               natural.
A man with a bright orange hunter’s cap comes into the shop

               to pick up his mother’s
grandfather clock, which her ex-husband shot “in the face” with a. 33
               because she liked it.

The owner has repaired the works and straightened out the minute
               hand, but the bullet hole
is still there between three and four o’clock.

               ”She didn’t want it
fixed completely. She wanted the story.” That’s it!
               We want the story

of what we can’t keep, and we want to smile a little
               while we embellish it for
whoever will listen, strangers, nobody, ourselves.

               The shop owner
starts telling me about the one-armed clock-maker who taught him
               how to take apart

a watch and put it back together blindfold, who plays
               every Sunday
the church organ, Bach preludes he’s rearranged for one hand

               so no one hears
his missing arm. I tell him I want to write a poem about his shop.
               ”Whoever likes my shop

likes me,” he says. “Send me a copy when you’re done.”
               I tell him he’ll be waiting
years. As I go out the door, I see the sign I didn’t notice

               when Icame in:
Welcome Hardings’ Clocks & Music Boxes. Outside, it’s alternating
               rain and sleet. Welcome,

I say to myself. Welcome rain. Welcome mud. Welcome the dead grass
               and unopened
crocus buds under slushy March snow. Welcome coming in and welcome going out.