Saturday, December 17, 2016

Jack Scott writes


 





 

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.

1 comment:

  1. 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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