MOMENTUM
At our temperate latitude,
the Earth is spinning at 800 miles per hour.
It's smooth, no roaring in the wind.
We move, we speak easily.
But every once in a while
two who were walking side by side
spin out, shattering in smoke,
like jets whose wingtips touch.
And now and then, seemingly randomly,
someone falls and does not get up,
and recedes with terrible velocity.
ESSAY ON CLOUDS
Maybe a whale, as Hamlet mused,
or a camel or weasel,
more likely a hill, still likelier
a school of hills, since (as with us)
true singletons are rare.
We compare them mostly
to silent things, sensing
that thunder is something else
that gets into them -- a stone, a god --
and as for what they want to say,
aeromancy, which presumed to interpret,
never caught on. After all,
clouds weren’t reliable predictors
even of rain, and if they had a message
for us, we guessed,
it would hardly be practical:
clouds are not about
about, showing instead
boundless detail without specificity.
Whales, sure (which might in turn be
blue clouds), but we don't say
How very like a screwdriver,
or my house, or my uncle, or certainly
how unlike my uncle. For though a blend
of winds we don’t at our level
necessarily feel lends them
amazing motion, that’s not the same as
intention, so failure
is not in question. We wouldn't say
That cloud is derivative, jejune,
disproportionate, strained, misplaced
or (since they affirm nothing)
That cloud is wrong,
though truly they often bear down
on exactly the wrong moment – that overcast,
is it one cloud or ten thousand
that makes everything feel so gray
forever? From inside, of course – think
of flying through one --
a cloud has no shape. As with us: only
when someone looks hard, or we catch
our reflections, do we solidify as
whale
weasel
fool
and plummet. Though large clouds weigh
more than a 747, not one
has ever crashed, so admirably
do they spread their weight, a gift
it is not too much to hope
we could possess, since according to Porchia
we are clouds: If I were stone
and not cloud, my thoughts,
which are wind, would abandon me. O
miracle not miraculous! Everything
we know well
lightens and escapes us, and isn’t that
when we escape? So just as
Old and Middle English clūd
meant rock or hill, but now
means cloud, really I mean
in exactly the same way that stone
got over being stone
and rose, we rise.
ESSAY ON CLOCKS
Old clocks are likely to be made of wood,
with black hands, visible only by day,
since at night they sleep, sure we are sleeping too.
Whereas new clocks are nocturnal, or more accurately,
they could, like us, be up at any hour,
red, squarish numerals shining day and night
whether we are watching them or not.
Old clocks have round and unassertive faces
reminding us in somewhat general terms
in a tone that says probably you already know this
that in a little while it will be noon.
They don't mind showing how they're coming to this conclusion,
the long hand dragging the stubby one after it.
Or is it the other way? Whereas new clocks
treat every moment as a red letter day:
11:42 in lights, suddenly displayed,
as if from their vast imaginative resources
they had just invented this particular number
that is Now, and yet in less than a minute
they will come up with something even better --
11:43, a New World Record! Later than Ever!
Old clocks, if they weren't so deferential, might mention,
that they have seen something rather like this before.
They think in circles, seeing what they know
one way in the morning, another in the afternoon.
New clocks sigh at such imprecision.
Half past, a quarter after? No, they are keeping track,
though secretly, of milli-, nano-, attoseconds!
Old clocks find this compulsive and a bit pedantic.
Why not relax? They can hear with equanimity
the clocks in the next rooms slightly disagreeing.
They know we are clocks ourselves,
you and I, who run at such different speeds,
faster or slower, or slower and faster,
that they are amazed we stay in sight of each other.
They know no clock that fits on a shelf or end table,
or sits in a chair, can describe all that is Now:
only the Universe as a whole has succeeded there.
Yet even the poor Universe is humbled
by what is so simple it is beyond our telling:
countless are the hours that have never ended,
infinite are the hours that never were.
