How Time Works

Every day around one o’clock time stops.
No one notices it but me,
the second hand of the clock above the whirlpool bath
at the Health Club jigging back and forth.
The whirlpool boils, the swimmers in the lap pool
behind me continue saving their own lives
from the pool that couldn’t care less.
But we all stop aging for that indeterminate stretch
between 1:05 and 1:06, or some days 1:07.
This is when five year-old Randy Deats returns
from beneath the azaleas beside my parents’ porch
after slapping Jann Poling and making her cry.
The smell of first grade – Crayolas,
school lunch milk, and pencil shavings -
settles like a hen over the entire gym,
then lifts. The FedEx guy at the front desk
is handing the receptionist his ballpoint pen
and for now neither of them notice it’s clogged.
The backs of my parents’ heads
in the darkened old Pontiac turn to one another
as we drive through the night on vacation to Florida,
their whispers and the hum of the tires
and the shadows passing over me in the back seat
pull me slowly into sleep.
We are never there yet, I don’t need
to stop at a gas station again, but wait,
I remember we left my little brother, Mike,
back there at the last one. He wanders out
of the Men’s Room sleepily,
looks around the empty parking lot,
mosquitoes and giant moths swarm around the streetlight
and he begins to cry. We are pulling farther
and farther away, the shadows sweep through the car,
I can barely keep my eyes open. My mother
slowly opens a Thermos of coffee for my father,
murmurs his name, “Bob?”.
The power lines throb past, “Where’s Mike?”.
But Bob is my name, too, and the second hand
carries us into 1:07.