Talking about Time

I've been reading Longitude by Dava Sobel. It's a wonderful book that explores the unsolvable problem of longitude (and answers a lot of my questions!). It remained a mystery for centuries. Until a British carpenter, named John Harrison, taught himself to make a clock that would maintain time on the deck of a rolling ship. Each chapter begins with a bit of poetry about time. I'm sharing a couple of my favorites so far.

Anastasia Suen hosts Poetry Friday at her poetry blog  today.

Photographer: Arne Nordmann (norro), Germany 

My Father's Watch

by John Ciardi

One night I dreamed I was locked in my Father's watch

With Ptolemy and twenty-one ruby stars

Mounted on spheres and the Primum Mobile

Coiled and gleaming to the end of space

And the notched spheres eating each other's rinds

To the last tooth of time, and the case closed.

From "Mystic Communion of Clocks"

in Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems

by Diane Ackerman

There being no mystic communion of clocks
    it hardly matters when this autumn breeze
    wheeled down from the sun
    to make leaves skirt pavement like a million lemmings

An event is such a little piece of time-and-space

    you can mail it through the slotted eye of a cat

    we all pretty much agree

    words just fret the bowed neck of time

So it's nothing to say that at 96 below

    on this lovely fall day in arctic Siberia

    a young woman carried home her daily milk

    not in a bottle but under her arm in a slab

Or that precisely at five o'clock in the evening

    the Trans-Siberian express tore streaks of iron

    from the vastness of nothing 

    and ran hell-bent to the extremities of nowhere