Best Clocks Poems

You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
...

Consider
a girl who keeps slipping off,
arms limp as old carrots,
into the hypnotist's trance,
...

Elan that lifts me above the clouds
into pure space, timeless, yea eternal
Breath transmuted into words
Transmuted back to breath
...

Things get broken
at home
like they were pushed
by an invisible, deliberate smasher.
...

arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies' Betterment League
Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting
In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag
Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting
...

Beloveds, now we know that we know nothing
Now that our bright and shining star can slip away from our fingertips like a puff of summer wind

Without notice, our dear love can escape our doting embrace
...

1. Cogida and death

At five in the afternoon.
It was exactly five in the afternoon.
...

We have a soul at times.
No one’s got it non-stop,
for keeps.
Day after day,
...

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on
the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.
downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking,
talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues
...

For my poems, my friend Valsa George has a hunger.
She’s over fifty, but, compared to me, she is younger.
She suggested I write about ‘the advantages of being old’.
It’s a challenge, but, Valsa, on this idea you have sold......
...

My friends without shields walk on the target

It is late the windows are breaking
...

I would like to sing someone to sleep,
have someone to sit by and be with.
I would like to cradle you and softly sing,
be your companion while you sleep or wake.
...

There was a time when in late afternoon
The four-o'clocks would fold up at day's close
Pink-white in prayer, and 'neath the floating moon
I lay with them in calm and sweet repose.
...

WHEN daisies pied and violets blue,
   And lady-smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
   Do paint the meadows with delight,
...

One day people will touch and talk perhaps
easily,
And loving be natural as breathing and warm as
sunlight,
...

Shine on, O moon of summer.
Shine to the leaves of grass, catalpa and oak,
All silver under your rain to-night.
...

THEY sing their dearest songs--
He, she, all of them--yea,
Treble and tenor and bass.
And one to play;
...

Tell me not, in doctored numbers,
Life is but a name for work!
For the labour that encumbers
Me I wish that I could shirk.
...

Middle-aged life is merry, and I love to
lead it,
But there comes a day when your eyes
are all right but your arm isn't long
...

I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At night I turn back the clocks;
......
...

The sounds of home greet me
the trickling sound of the fish tank
my mother's eccentric cackling
and my step father's loud voice
...

When Dawn strides out to wake a dewy farm
Across green fields and yellow hills of hay
The little twittering birds laugh in his way
And poise triumphant on his shining arm.
...

By day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and
has a soul.
Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into
it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are
...

Est brevitate opus, ut currat sententia, neu se
Impediat verbis lassas onerantibus aures:
Et sermone opus est modo tristi, saepe jocoso,
Defendente vicem modo Rhetoris atque Poetae,
...

I lie on my back at midnight
hearing the marvelous strange chime
of the clocks, and know it's mid-
...

Then was my neophyte,
Child in white blood bent on its knees
Under the bell of rocks,
Ducked in the twelve, disciple seas
...

The roads also have their wistful rest,
When the weathercocks perch still and roost,
And the looks of men turn kind to clocks
And the trams go empty to their drome.
...

When I woke, the town spoke.
Birds and clocks and cross bells
Dinned aside the coiling crowd,
...

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!
The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand
...

A form, as any taper, fine ;
A head like half-pint bason ;
Where golden cords, and bands entwine,
As rich as fleece of JASON.
...

where we live the flowers of the clocks catch fire and the plumes encircle the brightness in the distant sulphur morning the cows lick the salt lilies
my son
my son
let us always shuffle through the colour of the world
...

Blest be the God of love,
Who gave me eyes, and light, and power this day,
Both to be busy, and to play.
But much more blest be God above,
...

I was a boy when I heard three red words
a thousand Frenchmen died in the streets
for: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity--I asked
why men die for words.
...

When I was young in yesteryear
Involved in pulling birds
We got our kicks from drinking beer
In pints, not halves or thirds
...

Through throats where many rivers meet, the curlews cry,
Under the conceiving moon, on the high chalk hill,
...

A prince I was, blue-eyed, and fair in face,
Of temper amorous, as the first of May,
With lengths of yellow ringlet, like a girl,
For on my cradle shone the Northern star.
...

1
Today, recovering from influenza,
I begin, having nothing worse to do,
This autobiography that ends a
...

Here, as in childhood, Brother, no one knows us.
And someone has died, and someone is not yet

born, while our father walks through his church at night
...

Before time,
before birth of
clocks, watches,
other ways to
...

Come queen of months in company
Wi all thy merry minstrelsy
The restless cuckoo absent long
And twittering swallows chimney song
...

A little garden on a bleak hillside
Where deep the heavy, dazzling mountain snow
Lies far into the spring. The sun's pale glow
Is scarcely able to melt patches wide
...

On moonlit heath and lonesome bank
The sheep beside me graze;
And yon the gallows used to clank
Fast by the four cross ways.
...

At the back of the houses there is the wood.
While there is a leaf of summer left, the wood

Makes sounds I can put somewhere in my song,
...

ABOVE the city hung the moon,
Right o'er a plot of ground
Where flowers and orchard-trees were fenced
With lofty walls around:
...

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
...

In the waking night
The forests have stopped growing
The shells are listening
The shadows in the pools turn grey
...

When, having finished, I shall move my armchair,
The page will gasp, awakened from the strain.
Delirious, she is half asleep at present,
...

(AMSTERDAM, 1645)


And there you are again, now as you are.
...

He was six foot four, and forty-six
and even colder than he thought he was
James Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks
...

The soft quem quam will be Scops the Owl
conjugation of nouns, a line of enquiry,
powdery stubble of the socratic prison
laurels crack like parchments in the wind.
...

Walls of night surround me
crowding hard and closing in.

Tonight’s sleep
...

Voices moving about in the quiet house:
Thud of feet and a muffled shutting of doors:
Everyone yawning. Only the clocks are alert.
...

In the cool of the night time
The clocks pick off the points
And the mainsprings loosen.
They will need winding.
...

The Mighty Mother, and her son who brings
The Smithfield muses to the ear of kings,
I sing. Say you, her instruments the great!
...

...

Is the spider a monster in miniature?
His web is a cruel stair, to be sure,
Designed artfully, cunningly placed,
A delicate trap, carefully spun
...

Evening is part of the jig-saw truth of her,
ply-wood ply-flesh, her insolent reply
blinding the ace with a straight shot to centre,
the woman's a delicate devil in twenty places
...

In another dimension
Still on my own feet
But somewhere in mind
Deeper at heart
...

In fifty years, when peace outshines
Remembrance of the battle lines,
Adventurous lads will sigh and cast
Proud looks upon the plundered past.
...

Weighing the steadfastness and state
Of some mean things which here below reside,
Where birds like watchful clocks the noiseless date
...

The only relics left are those long
spangled seconds our school clock chipped out
when you crossed the social hall
...

When the sun rises
It ignites the world
And humanity rises
As its rays cascade
...

As a sloop with a sweep of immaculate wing on her delicate spine
And a keel as steel as a root that holds in the sea as she leans,
...

The schools marched in procession in happiness and pride,
The city bands before them, the soldiers marched beside;
Oh, starched white frocks and sashes and suits that high schools wear,
The boy scout and the boy lout and all the rest were there,
...

Almost Heaven a solo harp al fresco!
Britten and Handel and Hildreth the Clocks,
Timperley's Clock Museum in Colchester.
Lucy Waterford harpiste extraordinaire,
...

Hot August noon: already on that day
Since sunrise through the Wiltshire downs, most sad
Of mouth and eye, he had gone leagues of way;
Ay and by night, till whether good or bad
...

Let's go hand in hand to a strange spot
Secretly, stealthily, without paying heed
To what they perceive and say of us
We'll take a walk in hillsides in pair
...

There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heated its iron,
water honeyed
...

I SAW a new world in my dream,
Where all the folks alike did seem:
There was no Child, there was no Mother,
There was no Change, there was no Other.
...

The clocks
go forward

by an hour.
...

You dweller in the dark cabin,
To whom the watermelon is always purple,
Whose garden is wind and moon,
...

When you're lying awake with a dismal headache, and repose is
taboo'd by anxiety,
I conceive you may use any language you choose to indulge in
without impropriety;
...

Begone, ye Critics, and restrain your spite,
Codrus writes on, and will for ever write,
The heaviest Muse the swiftest course has gone,
...

By the blue taper's trembling light,
No more I waste the wakeful night,
Intent with endless view to pore
The schoolmen and the sages o'er:
...

Look, Dear, how bright the moonlight is to-night!
See where it casts the shadow of that tree
Far out upon the grass. And every gust
Of light night wind comes laden with the scent
...

So was their sanctuary violated,
So their fair college turned to hospital;
At first with all confusion: by and by
Sweet order lived again with other laws:
...

By the East River and the Bronx
boys were singing, exposing their waists
with the wheel, with oil, leather, and the hammer.
Ninety thousand miners taking silver from the rocks
...

My parents thought that I would be
As great as Edison or greater:
For as a boy I made balloons
And wondrous kites and toys with clocks
...

The seven o'clock whistle
Made the morning air fulvous
With a metallic syncopation,
A key to a door in the sky---opening
...

'Tis late at night, and in the realm of sleep
My little lambs are folded like the flocks;
From room to room I hear the wakeful clocks
...

People will touch and talk perhaps easily,
And loving be natural as breathing,
And warm as sunlight;
...

When the light falls on winter evenings
And the river makes no sound in its passing
Behind the house, is silent but for its cold
Flowing, its reeds frozen stiffer than glass
...

I need concrete with sharp corners
Green waves crashing onto rocks
Brisk air and salty stares
...

Come queen of months in company
Wi all thy merry minstrelsy
The restless cuckoo absent long
And twittering swallows chimney song
...

'Oooooh he was so...young! '
she moaned.

'But I played it
...

On that old bridge, during the last fight,
Threw the ring into the river to drown and rest,
Returned to find that young heart in the old body,
Still holding the placard of ‘I am sorry' to the wind,
...

When I was broke in London in the fall of '89,
I chanced to spy in Oxford Street this tantalizing sign,
...

Grandson's first birth-day
His cousins arrived
Twin girls half his age
Two is company, three is a crowd
...

Hello Winter, hello flanneled
blanket of clouds, clouds
fueled by more clouds, hello again.
...

THE City clocks point out the hours
They look like moons on their darkened towers-
...

A happy lot, us Sad Bastards.
We raise our glasses
Kick some asses
Laugh, tell rude jokes
...

Pale, with the blue of high zeniths, shimmered over with silver, brocaded
In smooth, running patterns, a soft stuff, with dark knotted fringes,
...

Who have been educated out of naive responses,
The hoodoo of love, the cinderella of class
Knowing that everywhere man has the same clock face,
the same moody defences
...

Now burst above the city's cold twilight
The piercing whistles and the tower-clocks:
For day is done. Along the frozen docks
The workmen set their ragged shirts aright.
...

Mostly folks is law-abidin'
Down on Wriggle Crick--,
...

You lay there in your thoughts,
That unwelcome intrusion

Like the tinnitus, that gift
...

One hour ago the crimson sun, that seemed so long a-drowning, sank.
The summer day is all but done. Our boat is moored beneath the bank.
...

In Rotten Row a cigarette
I sat and smoked, with no regret
For all the tumult that had been.
The distances were still and green,
...

So quiet it was in that high, sun-steeped room,
So warm and still, that sometimes with the light
...

TAKE your great light away, your music end;
I'm off to feed myself as quick as I can.
You're perfectly impossible to comprehend,
...