Fault

Hotel Orologio

28 Hotel Orologio Bologna The calendar is intolerable to all wisdom, the horror of all astronomy, and a laughing-stock from a mathematician’s point of view. —Francis Bacon 1. Incipit. The argument of moon and sun Contradicting each other by long degrees; Months and seconds of a marriage, lunatic As any, across which the body Draws pulse and shadow; mass Against whose pull we tilt and bobble— But meantime, I rise alone in a hotel 2. Named for the space between us. A wake-up call, Though the room hums with time’s devices: Electric calendar, electric clock That’s lost its hands but buzzes through the minutes, Counting invisibly from the desk While the nightstand clock flips its digits And the TV maps the weather. Six-fifteen. 3. You would like this room’s machined noise, Though the postcard will reach you after I do: The tower clock. In the window, its face turns Right to me. I even have a scale So I can count in kilos how I’ve passed 29 Time in Italy, bean by tender bean. Each second Something lodges under the skin. 4. Days will shorten. We’ll take our time to notice. And will I notice, if I lose a day Moon, sun, and stars can’t reconcile? Here is what comes of division: Eleven minutes here and there add up. In prison half a life, I’d think of time But only how it left me, not the numbers 5. That might help me keep it all in mind— And Bacon won in time, though never Soon enough to know it. For all this, We have too many instruments to mismeasure The universe’s raucous goings-on By swoops and dips, unlikely spheres turning Heaven’s great gestures overhead: 6. The stars have always moved us to miscount Intervals, daylight hours, clever turns, as if Geometry could elaborate truth from vision, Globes imagined with such intricate love They show the power of mind over matter— Mind winged or windblown, toothed, nailed To some mast overlooking sea 30 7. Monsters, muscle-bound gods, serpents coiled To guard our progress from the unknown: oh, The mind can encompass any world It creates, down to the peacock tail Spread to fan a mystic continent, World turning over in such a prison Of belabored metal, orbit, transit, 8. Only mind, that stubborn, matterless thing, Wrong-headed, could free us, set us drifting On the rolling, nothing wave of time Then measure a second to the quadrillionth. Clocking fire. Explosions. Music. Shadows. Angles and rolling balls, spheres dropping, Stone, cesium atoms, crystals, fans. 9. And I could go on—though sand, in its way, Is more like it, that wave of particles, Or the movement of shadow across a face. Even aroma: the ember burning down This incense stick to ash, thread by thread, until The steel ball dips. Time’s up. Truth, after all, Is only time, though there is beauty in it 10. Until we try to parse it—the second now 31 Marked and packeted, a discretion That never was until we imagined it. This is what comes of mathematics: The equinox slides its way into midsummer. Whatever we try to measure, we count wrong. The truth: it’s hot in Italy, solstice gone 11. To heat. Where you sleep, it’s still spring: The earth whirling you headlong into summer Carries me away from you just as fast. At dinner, I’ll eat fresh tomatoes Spilling seed and liquid, perfected moment. Artichokes. Oil pressed from olives Harvested last fall. I’m a tourist, 12. Only passing through. Traveling alone, I will drop my eyes from strangers’ eyes As if the gaze could create force between us, Light, particular. I could count the days Without you, but numbers cannot alter What the body knows. I ride its wave, Cresting before we know it. Not explicit. ...