Blue Mountain Arts Poetry Contest

The Maker of Clocks
by Lisa Holme

Ninth Contest
First Place

Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths.
No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until
they have been married a quarter of a century. 
— Mark Twain

My husband uses tools with precision, 
saws with thin blades made for slicing 
through bone and steel. He makes 
living look kind and right even 
when I swing heavy and light, 
some queer noisy pendulum, a clock 
not quite centered on the wall, its 
arm clicking or squeaking off-balance 
against the tick, tick, tick of steady time. 
I watch him mark, ruler, level, cut - 
"Measure once, measure twice, then 
cut." I know this much, the first 
rule of love.

I have wavered 
here next to his workbench for 
seven years, his hands glistening 
against bird's eye maple, cedar, 
and holy oak. I think... we've been too 
easy. Do you ever hate this silence? 
Our simplicity? Tick-tock, tick-tock? 
The way we say, "I love you," and roll 
toward one another in the dark? 
It is like a ritual, no foreign, desperate, 
revolving sea to part. No new religion.

I do not say these things to him, only 
watch his soft movement and remember 
the gift he gave on my 35th, a grand- 
daughter clock, inscribed "In Memory Of 
Forrest and Laurie Grace, With Love." 
I think of the hours it must have taken, 
the steady bones of his intent, how 
he soaked the hardwood for days, 
until it was swollen, adrift, his tedious, 
tender method of putting heated iron to 
wood, the strength it takes to bend what 
God made straight, that rigid frame, 
the precision of his muscles when 
forming time's smooth crown, his delicate 
kneeling fingers laying the mother-of- 
pearl down in to the wood's tight grain.

"Now, at this stage," he says, 
"I get a little anxious. All the pieces 
are here, and I'm certain I must 
assemble them, dowel and glue 
and nail — there's no going back. 
If I make a mistake, if angles 
don't match, if bends don't meet 
at the proper point, all this 
will be for nothing." He passes 
his hand across what is to me 
some strange cacophony of wood, 
a life in all its phases, pauses for a 
moment to look at me, to pull me in 
with his yawning blue eyes, and touches 
me, tiptoes across my skin, this I know you 
without words — a certainty of such magnitude, 
I cannot resist. I step into him, 
my secondhand body moving forward, 
tick-tick-ticking toward him, my heart, 
an arrhythmic sputtering alarm, and he, 
the maker of clocks.