My grandfather's pocket watch.(New poems)(Poem)

 
My grandfather's pocket watch 
 
   1 
 
   The filigreed watch case clicks open and inside 
   I find time's intimate machinery: 
   the interlocking wheels' circumference, 
   the pintoothed sprockets that still coincide, 
   even though the little self-important melody 
   that marked the subdivisions of the hour 
   is broken now, and mute. 
 
      Desolate of consequence, 
   the pocket watch's innards look like our 
   old diagrams of the Ptolemaic heavens 
   with epicyclical and sweet-greased spheres 
   --except that Made in U.S.A. appears 
   etched on a satiny spring, 
 
      and George Evans 
   & Son, New York, glints up from another. 
 
   2 
 
   A second hand still whiskers the watch's face 
   and staggers when I shake it in my fist. 
 
   ...