Waterclock
Razor gears of waterclock,
trim drops from dripping time
preserving from evaporation
what it can of it.
Metronomic microtome
slices transparencies
from opacity into pages
for an endless scrapbook.
Buried pain like unremembered sutures
before the stitches were removed,
winged bookmarks
stuck like wizened moths.
One year of you
dividing time in two
into, not past and present,
but near and far.
Two kinds of time
to strop the razor hands
following infinity
like relentless barber.
Some days seem
a month of weeks.
Some seconds fail,
yet minutes nevermind.
At first, all drops the same
full term and live
full round with both of us,
none smaller than the rest.
Becoming steam,
a consequence
of spontaneous ignition
as we feel and act our heat.
We rise into our cloud as one
ascendant life's best fit
time - round and bountiful
our eyes looking within.
We’re not allowed full honeymoon
before physics brings us down,
pulls us apart and rains us
down the maw of waterclock.
Embrace streams away so swiftly
into the sea of lost and missing things
again anonymous, undifferentiated
sliced into pieces of a sizeless past.
Drops becoming liquid once again
endlessly, you and I within it
but where?
Every where’s the same.
[top] 19th-century illustration of Ctesibius's clepsydra from the 3rd century BCE. the hour indicator ascends as water flows in, and a series of gears rotate a cylinder to correspond to the temporal hours. [bottom] His water clock as visualized by the 17th-century French architect Claude Perrault.
Ktesibios was a 3rd-century BCE Greek inventor and mathematician and was probably the first head of the Museum of Alexandria. None of his written work has survived, though he wrote the first treatises on the science of compressed air and its uses in pumps and a cannon) and discussed the elasticity of air. Early in his life, when he was a barber, he invented a counterweight-adjustable mirror. He also invented the hydraulis (a water organ), a force pump for producing a jet of water or for lifting water from wells, and a clepsydra ("water thief"), the most accurate clock ever constructed until the Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens detailed the use of pendulums to regulate clocks in 1656 and built a working prototype. The principle of the siphon has also been attributed to him.
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