Horology

Outside my old room,
humid with dreams, rain fell
warm in the arms of darkness,

drummed its thousand beats.

Night turned all the clocks
from day to morning; chance
wound midnight down to sleep;

nothing waited to be born in the small hours.

My childhood misremembered,
I lay, face-down, breathing
the bed-linen promise
of waking to a different light
behind the curtained morning.

I had misunderstood the weather,
wind, rain, sun, all the seasons
between sky and stone,

whatever their promises might have been.

I had kept time’s unsteadiness
strapped too tight on my wrists,
counting out the beans of my lifetime

as if there was some pattern to it.
© BH, 2020

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The study of time. I can’t figure if this was a memory. Perhaps I had misremembered too much to be only left with this invention. Maybe it’s where everyone ends up; trying to recall and make sense of the past, that foreign land where nothing was quite what it seemed. Not even the same shape…