for Mayor Steve Benjamin’s 10th State of the City address
29 January 2020
There is never only one clock.
Even here, there are two, and both
must be wound by hand since time isn’t
just the turn of sun or season or
the binary beat of your watch but
someone’s hand long ago turning
a key, a crank, so that everybody got
to work and trains mostly ran on time.
There is never only one clock.
Even here, there are two, and both
have four faces, as if the tempo of Main
Street changes from one block to another,
as if those going north toward city hall
see time differently from those headed
south to the statehouse, where stories
congeal into marble, even when
they’re not quite true. It depends
on where you stand. Whether you are
in front of the jewelry store or
the bank, the art museum or the coffee
shop, the hotel or the dorm, the Brazilian
steakhouse where the attendant is parking
your car, or the water department, where
you’re standing in line to pay your bill.
The clock of someone waiting at a bus
stop is different from the clock of a man
driving a car, which is different from
the clock running out at the end
of a game. The coffee shop is in one
time zone, the hospital another, and they
are only blocks from each other.
There is never only one clock.
There is the clock on the wall, the clock
on your wrist, and all the clocks embedded
in our flesh. There is the clock of the river,
which measures its banks, and the clock
of pollen, which slows us all down
until the rains wash the air. There is
the clock of stoplights, the clock of school
buses. There is the sun clock and the moon
clock, the circulations of feral cats,
the visitations of migrating birds, the orb
spiders hanging golden clocks in autumn
air, and the strange and beautiful clock
of fireflies synchronizing themselves with one
another. And it is not always clear
how these synch with the clock of council
meetings or the replacement of street lights
or parking meters or artwork at the airport.
There are two clocks on the same street.
Time is the circle of the sun over
the river, seeing the same things again
but in a slightly different light, and time
is also the wavy line of the river
beneath the sun, always moving on.
January is a clock with two faces
facing opposite ways. One hand
waves a flag of corn and cotton, as if
here we think we’re still there, in a past
that was small and unfair, where justice
might have been the queen of virtues, but
someone kept her blindfolded. The other
hand unfurls something like a wing,
a wave, a page about to be turned
at last. And a decade is just another
way to say the train depot is not
a depot, the post office is no longer
a post office, the park was something else,
and a bank has slapped its logo over
the shoulder of the statehouse. A decade is
a way to draw a dark line through all
the little changes, not a clock but
the shadow of a bridge over the ripples
of the river, to say look at what all
has happened between there and here.