My wife, because she day-dreams catalogues
and never knows what to give me (though, ah, she does)
ordered for my birthday from Future-Now
an Omni-Function Digital Synchro-Mesh
alarm wrist watch that beeps Caro nome,
though when I set it A.M. it beeps P.M.
I showed pleasure because of her pleasure and because
I have always accepted her choices. But when my son
asked to borrow it, I let him keep it.
I know time only as a circle. Star time.
Sun and moon time. Dark and lit as tides.
He has learned time as a series of linear blinks.
He may be inventing a new code of perception.
Because I am obsolete, I cannot read it.
Or do not care to. Why should the old hound
stop sniffing and sprout wings? What is the scent
of the upper air? I am rooted nose-to-the-ground,
circling and tracking memories of deep earth.
I nuzzle day and night on a simplest dial,
glad to die thoughtfully in no hurry,
and to will him the many-tabbed side-functions:
push for day, date, month, horoscope sign,
omen-computer, saint’s day, point in orbit,
life expectancy, gross national product.
It could set its own alarm. By sonar scan
it could activate a robot whose eyes blink
the identity code of the successor species.
It could set itself to say, “At the sound of the chime
all circuits will be charged with induced Hebrew
in time to hear God announce the next illusion.”
I look out the window far as my father went
past the bird-limed sundial, and think I hear my son
-or something—ping in a solid state cathedral
programmed to project a 4-D God.
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