The Tick of a Second Hand (poem)
My Titanic poem. Harry Widener, one of the victims, had purchased while abroad a 1598 edition of Francis Bacon’s essays. It was in his possession when he went down with the ship.
The Tick of a Second Hand
The landing gear came down
And a long becalming slick
Smothered the water in a broadening swath
that rose at the interstice of sun and sea
Vaporing in blue
Fell from the rigored bird beast
that in its throes shuddered and upraised its nose
and sought to climb
At length it showered many things
Among them screens and screens
That for a time flashed blue then died
“I have never known the rules,” said the half-buried
knight
The china cup handle and the brittle stars,
the spider crab and the worms
The tin box that had been the knight’s home, and the
rusticles that had grown
Pinioning him when at the first upheaval
the maelstrom had spirited him to the
immortal shadow realm
And the shadow was a lie
If Bacon told the truth
They relied on the teachings of the spider crab
who had devoured the essays
Then laid them in a thousand eggs
The knight, the pawn, and the bishop had fallen
Each to his resting place
The bishop white, the knight black, and the pawn
still trapped in the tin box could tell nothing of himself
“Superstition hath been the confusion of many states”
The spider crab touched
Her eyestalk close to the half-buried knight’s face
And for malice’s sake, swung the rostrum towards
the little worms
Who recessed themselves in terror at the
memory of her words
Corruption
How like a gift drifting
Rarest species of lumbering jellyfish
The chessmen first untethered from the board
and then this glimpse
into the mysteries of the Hand
The brittle stars slice with their ponderous grace
One, two, three they gather with hard labor
in the gelid plasmatic depth
“Of truth, of death, of unity”
Some shrouded thing surrounded by a halo descends
It lands
And the china cup handle, the half-buried knight feel
After a sleep of a hundred years which is to them
the tick of a second hand
Miraculous movement
The Tick of a Second Hand
Gravity Hold the Moon
(2015, Stephanie Foster)