"Horologue"

Horologue

The clock inside the mantid egg under the drifted snow,
the sap clock in the February tree,
von Karajan’s internal metronome
with different signatures exact in either hand,
terns, orcas, caribou in shrunken herds,

state ministers who synch their talks
into the general’s scheme, stock brokers
taking note, and families at the border with no plan,
the unhoused axle of the planet wobbling
one half turn among the stars in thirteen thousand years,

hatched leatherbacks not making for the heavens
into the surf but pulling onto the highway
with front flippers bloody toward new lights in town, clock
stopped on the mantel, pockmarks of storm systems on the sun,
ticking from inside a flame-rapt log

: Brooks Haxton, The Sun at Night (1995)