On delicate wrist of women, prisoned fast
With carat twine,
A golden beetle or ticking skull, the sharp insignia shine.
Sarcophagus your name: the vehicle wrist
You eat like yellow acid to the bone.
Ventriloquist: the nod of scholar bell,
Lank whistle or red gong or telephone.
Cruel to the poor: in tenement’s dark cell
Your hard alarm at morning like a fist.
You mock the moneyed ear with alpine rime,
Hide wars in ormolu, death in a chime.
Ships, trains to you their black hosanna toss.
Watcher of loss,
Your fat and twitching grin is banker’s boss.
Your favor more than moon all lovers want
Two orbits’ equinox.
Your cricket heart, physician’s music box,
Is puppet taunt
To limbs by thought or passion racked, with sin or grandeur gaunt.
The world: a somber gallery of clocks:
Faces, the human dial; ruins that tell
The time of pride and politics and war;
The moon revolving to a rusty shell;
Pendulum pines; the flooded glass of shore
And terrible tick of shipwreck on the rocks.
At every chink the scoring eye of time.
Even man, the clockface doll with lips of rime
(Himself by deft and joking jeweler planned)
Whose nerve and gland
Run sweet, explode, and separate in sand,
Stares here: where Easter and dark Friday lie
In crystal, pins of gold,
Where tension of slow god in decades doled
Breeds ape and fly,
And, through a tinsel gear of watch, motors the heavy sky.
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