TWO CLOCKS BY SIMON ARMITAGE - 1999
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Your support makes all the difference.In the same bedroom we kept two small clocks,
one you could set your watch by, the other
you could not. The night we lost the good clock
under the bed, the other seemed to know
to take its turn, and was a metronome
until the lost clock was found. Then it stopped.
Like emergency lighting kicking in
during a power cut, or biking it
half asleep on the back of a tandem,
or gliding home with the engine broken.
And since neither of us can talk freely
on Albert Einstein's General Theory,
electromagnetic flux, black magic
or the paranormal, let us imagine
that all objects and events are open
to any meaning we choose to give them,
and that if the absence of one timepiece,
causes another to take up the pace,
then these clocks could be said to demonstrate
some aspect of our love or private thoughts.
Stretching the point to another level,
maybe the effect is causal, and life -
if we could get things right on a small scale,
between people - might conform to this rule
of like for like - it could be that simple.
Maybe these clocks are a poor example.
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