The other day, Dad and I loaded up some of our family’s antique clocks and took them down to a shop for cleaning and repair. They included Papa’s 19th century mantel clock which will come to me when it’s ready. It’s funny how some sounds stink in your soul and come to be something greater than possible. But I sit here, listening to the fine plastic thock thock of the Ingraham quartz above the desk. Somewhere in a vastness of bare grapestalk and fallow ground, grafted black walnut trunks, wildeyed hungry jackrabbits, and the terrible finitude of Highway 99, part of me hears that clock that came in my years to mean, as much as anything, Christmas. You see, he kept it set and wound, and it measured with an ironsure tatok tatok the vigil of Santa Claus. I remember laying there on many Christmas Eves, thinking dawn would never come. I never thought to dread or even dream how long the night can truly be.
WINDING PAPA’S CLOCK
If I were sitting on the red brick hearth
where my Grandma held me on her lap
in 1962, I could watch the old mulberry
recede into another dawn of valley fog.
I used to stand on that hearth and Papa
would let me wind his clock. Ten half
turns, more or less, clockwise for
the chimes and counter for the drive.
I talk to Grandma on the phone.
The tree is putting on new leaves
in all this sun, incessant rain.
Papa’s chair with slow electric lift is gone
from its place in the living room.
She visits him daily, says the nurses are
decent, but the clock has run down.
Kyle Kimberlin
April, 1998
Metaphor 