the clock

There was a clock that clinked and clang every hour, every day.
Each time I looked up into that weather-beaten face,
I saw time, walking, slipping, fluttering…away.

It had peeling brown paint, slapped onto its circular frame. Even glass glazed over the long black numbers. It reflected little spotlights onto the pavement where I stood, gazing up in awe and reverence. How resolutely the longest black arm moved, from mark to mark, stealing the hours away. Never speeding up, never slowing down. Time. Always, on and on, without one thought of the rushing world that tried to defeat it, or the plodding moments that belong to childhood and aged wrinkles. Somehow people went around it, flattened it to their liking, but it never really changed. It swindled them. In the end every person found that time had gone on, whether they had acknowledged it or not. So I stood, running my finger against the rough stones that made its fortress to the sky, and wondered.
Of course time still went on, even as I thought on it. My childhood years, though made of days and days could still be stated in a few small sentences, a few small memories of the things I noticed in the blur. They stood out as a flash of fresh color, firm in a place of a different making; where color was not real and firmness a myth, the place of forgotten insignificance. Familiar and happy faces there were, swing sets, sand, sea shells, wind, reading, writing until my hand ached, trees, blackberries, shadows, tall doors, cold water, soft grass, sudden rain, smiling dolls, and pretending, always imagining things up. I inquisitively watched the quiet moments that stole over people, when they pulled into themselves and thought of time that went on without them. Just a moment though. Then the blankly staring eyes would flicker and come back into focus. Or were the only true moments of focus when they drew back and looked hard at the road in time they had beaten?
I walked on through the days. Things I never wished to end died in their tracks, leaped from my grasp like water that slips and glides past. I began to notice that there were things I had that I did not appreciate until they were spent. I began to think of the moment as it happened. I would place each beautiful thing that came, into that other world of color and firmness, so as to never loose them to the forgotten insignificance. It served me well. I found ways to cheat time.
There was more than friends and games that needed savoring though. There were deeper things I found you could loose, in a deeper chasm than distance; trust, love, innocence, youth, even the giant life. The setting sun of my youth did come and I knew that I could only keep as much as I saved.
There I stood on the pavement, gazing up in awe and reverence. How resolutely the longest black arm moved, from mark to mark, stealing the hours away. Never speeding up, never slowing down. Time…and as I moved into a new place in life, I clutched a satchel full of time. There was no way to stop time, but there was a way to keep it, hold it in my hand. Memories of the moments…there I could hold it, in my hand, in my head, and in my heart.