Some things my kids will never know.
Shoelaces: short fuses set
on stumble, on sluggish, on drag.
A vague triumph in mastering the loops and slaloms.
And knots, those dwarfish
metaphors of raveling and un-,
of tenacity and its capricious rewards.
Clock hands, not just toeholds for Harold Lloyd,
but an analogy of pirouetting spheres
with airy mouthfuls of quarter to, half past.
The dovetail of shadowless noon.
And midnight.
Tocks and other unseemly
eructations of the second hand.
Its sweeping arc.
The telephone dial alphabet
inciting tersely worded exchanges:
LUdlow, TRemont, MUrray Hill.
The subway racketing as each pass
around the black hatbox is completed.
In its heart a metal clapper and a bell.
Typewriters, with their attendant
messes: screwed-up balls of paper,
white-out and its chalky quill.
Sooty raised letters launching
their uncouth clatter, redolent if trench coats,
of a press pass flown full-masted
from the hatband of a fedora.