The Clockmaker's Joy

[fastmarshmallow]

The Clockmaker's Joy


In the heat that’s dry and white like hay
the intolerable bright
of summer’s day


and you - a sundial trapped within it
I beckon you to come away
and slip the minute.


Without the metronomic gears
to click away the passing years
without the ticking panic that it brings
without the entropy of springs


we can leap up to the sky
casting off the weight of death and birth
and years that pass, the curvature of earth
can fall beneath us as we fly.

but

close your eyes and feel the shadows turn
and night will find you there upon the chaise
helpless to the years that churn
and turn your body into clay.


Look out the window now, across the lawn
across the brook across the moonlight’s chill
and cast away your fear of dawn
your premonition of the daylight

crashes

Twelve groups of children gather on the hill
and burn the moon to ashes.

As I was reading this aloud in my head, I felt as though the ticking of my wristwatch, sat on my bedside table, became unusually pronounced and inconsistent... In other words, bravo!

I particularly enjoyed (from an auditory perspective) how, S3, is syllable-heavy and sluggish (i.e., 'met-ro-nom-ic', 'ent-ro-py') and then S4 suddenly breaks into light/airy/skittish semantics + sonics - which I think helps convey the euphoria of being liberated from the chains of time (particularly with the beautiful fricative sounds produced by 'fall beneath us as we fly').

After 'but', the colour of the poem changes entirely, as dawn turns to dusk. The final image of the twelve children (incarnation of the passing day) is I think just the right conclusion to this fashionably existentialist poem. I wish someone could paint that scene - perhaps you can commission any talented artists you know. 

One stylistic quibble - in S2, L2, the two successive "you"s feel disruptive to me. (But NB: the triple "across" in S6 feels rhetorically right and purposive to me, keep that)
Again - in S4, L1, is 'up' necessary? "we can leap to the sky" shifts stress onto 'leap' which sounds better to my ear --> perhaps then you can change next line's tense from present continuous to simple i.e., "casting" to "cast" (in the interests of meter?)