Читать книгу Devils & Islands - Turner Cassity - Страница 9

Before Clocks Were Digital

Tonguing the brushes as they line a phosphorescent paint

Upon the dials that are piecework of their day,

The girls who presently will harbor cancer in the jaw

And die of it in more than one sense Time destroys.

In most of us a radium does not accumulate.

The numerals, however, do. They sum to what,

Subtracted by its twin the midnight hour, is nought indeed:

Zero of a departed beat, a darkened face.

As radium decays it goes to half-life, interim

Which we are not permitted. Half-life is for us

The half we call a coma. Greenish numerals that light

Insomnia, the hands that track it, are, dispersed

In time, the ghosts of those who painted them, or at the least

Their fit memorials—of application, tongue,

And talent, faint but glowing, form: the minute’s trace prolonged

Beyond the minute, time-specific and yet more.