Tick tock,  drip drop   in the old clock factory
that marked the beginning of this century in Brooklyn,
a place where time was measured out, monitored,
divided into past, present, and future,

the hands circling through the repeated hours,
as the days, months and years went forward,
miming our planet’s daily rotation, and our moon’s
revolution about it, one-tenth a millennium ago.
 
Four stories of windows pierce the red brick walls
so the sunlight shined onto the dark timber floor
and unto heavy wooden tables where limber
fingers assembled the delicate brass gears, fitted

the beveled glass into the trimmed wooden case, 
to the sounds of men and women sawing, sanding,
and staining the cherry, the oak,  the ear
bent low to hear the quiet tick tock

and then the chimes ringing out the quarter hour
to the tune of those at Westminster or St. Michael’s,
while in the vast courtyard, they are casting the bronze
bodies of mantle clocks with figures of ancient soldiers

standing at attention to the Grand General, Time,
as the raw materials of clock-making pass through
the gates and finished pieces roll out onto Seventh Avenue
from whence they will be pulled by horse, by train

to Connecticut, Illinois, California and  and by ship
to New Zealand and China. Is all this energy, this distillation of spirit,
gone down with those who worked here?
Or is it still here in these dry timbers, in these pocked

brick walls, like the clay salts that leach out
following a heavy autumn rain, or the events and
incidents of childhood that are still clearly present within us –
like my friend Loren leaping through the classroom window

and running across the schoolyard and down the road  
away   away …  and the teacher running after  --  and the future,
that is also present within us, as the courtyard fountain
sputters and spurts into watery flame, and the light

flits like birds through the mock pear trees that flank
the courtyard and through the windows where it flickers
on the eyelids of men and women who wake and dress
then wake and dress their children and off they go

to office, to school, as in come the twice-a-month maids
and the sitters for the babies and toddlers.  And next week there
will be no Y2K disaster:  the power will not fail, computers will
not miscalculate accounts or send planes

crashing from the sky.  Neither will we be vacationing
on the moon or shaking hands with our own clone, and
we will not have eliminated poverty, or war, or racism. No,
the millennium will not arrive in a single day.

But here in this century-old clock factory, children’s voices will ring out
against the slate and the light will stream
freely into the rooms, spreading its marmalade across
the hundred-year-old the brick walls

through which the salts still seep by day by night
spalling off slivers of brick that fall and lie upon
the shiny hardwood floors like time sliced,
until it is swept up and dumped unceremoniously
into the trash bin…

Drip    drop  

Tick    tock

                        Anything divided by itself equals one.