Time on Its Small Journey

          I
Shelves of clocks and watches.
Neat arrays of miniature tools,
mainsprings and balance wheels, cases and cogs,
like a small herd of ticking creatures
by the altar of Dad’s workbench.
 
All things clockish found their way here,
whether castoffs or heirlooms.
My earliest grasp of time was quietude,
dim light from street-level window,
overhead lightbulb..
 
I knew to stand still, hands behind my back
and sometimes he took the spyglass from his eye,
fixed it in mine—I stared in wonder, my small smooth hand
pocked as chickenskin, corrugated scab on my knuckle.
 
Time scampered through my green years.
my sons and their going, then
galloped through teaching years, each term a tide
of fresh faces while only I seasoned,
paused for an escape into literature,
once for an astonishing late love. 
                                                      It crept
through Dad’s long illness and returned me
to a home now strange. My widowed mother, breakfast:
coffee (her silver coffeepot), raisin toast, marmalade. Tremulous.
Each day she wound his clocks, which
whirred and chimed and
cuckoo’d through the night.
 
          II
But birth and death at once?
Time frozen back in Guyana,
where we gathered, museum curators
around an Amerindian skeleton:
young woman dead in childbirth,
infant stuck in her pelvis.
 
Imagine.
See her soft-footed into the bush,
digging stick in hand, cassava basket full,
perhaps before those caravels arrived
cargoed with disease and slavery. Bird-voices of girls,
faces adorned with red ochre. Black fall
of her hair, belly burgeoning.
 
Terrible, terrible, that we gaze and chat.
We should not be here.
Forever wilt thou love and she be fair. Not here. Forever
will she flex and strain, forever wrench and labour.
Always the child on its small journey.