Auden’s Stopped Clock

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood; For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Stop the clocks if they can be stopped, though I know they cannot, because the clock upon the mantel continues even now, marking out the hours she will never see and I will never cease measuring against her absence, and cut the telephone wires and let them hang slack in the weather, and silence the dog because there was a time when it would rise at the sound of her footsteps upon the porch and there is no sound now, only the memory of sound, and close the piano and cover the mirrors and let the drum speak low and distant, because there are moments when grief seems less like an emotion than a country one enters and from which someone else returns.

Yet even if every clock were stopped and every wire severed and every mouth silenced, the moon packed away and the sun dismantled and the stars dispersed, the chair would stand beside the porch rail where it has stood for years. Rain has darkened the wood and summers have bleached it pale again. One arm is smoother than the other where her hand rested. The cane seat sags slightly in the middle. Sometimes I think I remember her face clearly. Then I discover I am remembering a photograph. Or a reflection in a window. Or a memory of a memory. What remains certain are smaller things.

The way she would pause at the top of the porch steps and look toward the road before sitting down, though she was not expecting anyone. The way she tucked a loose strand of hair behind one ear while reading. The way she would set her teacup upon the railing and forget it there until dusk. The way she laughed once with such sudden force that she had to place a hand against the table. That laugh returns to me more often than entire years.

The cedar tree remembers her better than I do. It stands at the edge of the yard where it always stood. I remember one evening — the year itself has vanished, the season as well — when she crossed the grass toward it carrying a book. The light was failing. She paused beneath the branches and looked westward across the fields. I do not know what she was thinking. At the time I did not ask. At the time it seemed there would be time enough to ask such things. There is always time enough.

Until the clock stops.