A Metronome for Ghosts

The clock sits in your study.
Once it belonged to your great grandfather,
a miracle of wood and gears and springs,
functional beauty

that quietly clicked away the decades,
ringing the hours,
echoing through the rooms filled
with burnished wood and heavy fabric, filled

with lives tied to the hours of the day.

He was a stationmaster they say,
a tracker of trains and schedules,
master of goods brought in from faraway cities, of goods
sent to places unknown and unvisited

by anyone in his small Virginia town.
Once a week he wound the clock,
the tarnished brass key wound twice,
once for the clock, once for the chimes, a ritual

keeping life aligned with it’s steady tick, tick, tick.

Generations later, the clock came to you,
a precious relic, a remembrance,
not of your great grandfather, whose face
you barely recall, except for a large photograph,

formal and void of life that hung on your parent’s mantle,
where this same clock lived for much of your life,
chiming through the nights, a comforting song of hours
ringing through the dark each time you visited.

It has followed you, this clock,

it’s heavy pendulum marking times of love and loss,
Of love lost and lives broken,
of children and cats and long nights
writing fruitlessly into the dawn, until

somehow, you lost the key. And the clock fell silent,
a decoration, a beautiful reminder void of life,
an face as empty as a former lover passing you on the street.
Someday you told yourself, you would find the key,

but you did not. Truth told, you did not look. Like you,

it became a beautiful ruin, silent and waiting,
for death or resurrection, waiting
in silence, neither broken nor working, simply unused,
hardly noticed. until years later,

you bought a ring of keys, all sizes. Pot luck in brass,
all in a whim, and when they arrived, these shiny new keys,
the very first one you chose, slid deftly into the clockface,
and you wound each set of springs.

And time began again, as if it had never left,

A slow tick tock of seconds, a gentle chime of hours,
remarkably accurate after so long an abandonment,
grace filled and without accusation
resuming it’s given task in life,

another generation of minutes marked,
of hours brought back to life and ringing
through a new home, a metronome for ghosts
to set them dancing, all the while needing not the old worn key,

but a new one.

About this Poem

The clock in the picture is the inspiration for this poem. It really was my great grandparents and it really did live in my parent’s house for many years and (obviously) I have it now, a Christmas gift from many years ago. And I really did lose the key and recently bought a new one. So for the past week the clock has been ticking away the minutes, and each time it chimes, I feel some connection to my past that is hard to explain.

But at the same time, The idea of having to get a new key resonated with me. It was, I felt a metaphor for parts of my life, where, after brokenness, I had to find my way to new things to set my spirit ticking away again. And how my move to Vermont resurrected my spirit in ways I could not have imagined when I first decided to come here. It brought me back to life, the same, yet changed.

All week I have been wrestling with this poem. Knowing it was there somewhere, and finally I was able to let it out. There’s a sense of relief.

And I can hear the ghosts dancing up stairs. I think it’s a waltz.

Tom