The sympathy of clocks is a phenomenon in which a pair of moving clock pendulums in close proximity synchronize movement.
1. The Ship Navigator’s Wife Tries Patience
The wet cave’s a brackish tomb.
Slick with meaning, forgiveness
rustles in the ginnel’s background.
I wonder about that incarnadine
atmosphere swirling cowlick
clouds, some sailor’s delight.
Brothers’ blood oaths. Fluorescence
of flowers and their bright
moon sweetness. The stars
quiver, tapping Morse patterns,
the patterns of wives’ longing,
of ships gone, of soft evenings
lost, of no more pink skies at night.
2. Dear Iona
How’s tricks, my bonnie lass? From this Arctic
journey, battle-on-the-seas sail, I send
you the jewels I have—sapphire Northern Lights
and red flak-fire. Such colors! Orders come
down each night. We acquire targets, then aim,
discharge hard salvos, launch shells. Missile tails
spin as bullets flicker zenith bridges
and score Luftwaffe bombers. Messerschmitts
pitch, dive. Injured gulls. The wrecks rain debris,
disintegrate in green-glow flames. Such hues!
Here, near the pole, my compass rolls. I feed
cannons, trace rounds. Big ordnance. Roars, sizzles,
whines—whistled tunes, soft claps, timpani thumps.
Threading volleys stitch far-flung hemispheres.
Gone. Gone. Short-shots crater boreal bowls.
Pocked. Our bombs hit somewhere distant and kill
somebody’s someone. But believe me, love,
we’re dead-spent, too, come dawn’s muster. Deaf, blind.
This war’s at sixes and sevens, ashes.
It’s whorled gun smoke, deck crows, dark noons eating
in the mess. Officers bicker, and mad
swells pitch and swallow swabbed hulls.
Cold beauty lives here, though—crown auroras,
a gibbous moon’s ivory face, navy fjords,
iced peaks trinkling like bobeche crystals,
broken cloud-light. Squalls inhale, exhale, pall.
Tonight, I watched whale pods surface, slick, black—
their backs sprayed spume in lace-patterned fountains.
Boys, pom-pommer cads, aimed their 2-pounders,
shot the depths. Those craven seamen mistook
mammals for U-boats. I yelled, STOP! They didn’t.
I then ordered them to stop. They saluted.
No fights are fair at the front. No fight’s fair.
When off-duty, through all-day barrages,
I bury inside my bunk. Or I walk
the boat to search for smiles. No kind person
exists here. No one mentions going home.
I imagine myself back there with you
on your channel island, swaddled and warm.