Before dancing cesium marked the seconds,
Time was for man 
The trickling of water
And the whirling of shadows;
The draining of sand
And the descent of flame down a wick.

But well beyond the ken of human eyes, 
Water and sand and shadow and flame
Have always looked beyond themselves 
To reckon the hours;
They look only to you and me—
We are the clock at the center of being.

And me-loving-you-while-you-hate-me
And you-loving-me-while-I-hate-you
Are the start and finish 
Of a grinning pendulum swing. 
And moving, moving, always moving,
We shrug and call ourselves “star-crossed”
As if such an allusion has a holy power
To suture the memories with which we are wounded.

But there are moments when I can tell
By the way you look up from the chess board
Or by the way you say “come over”
That time has come to stand still.

Because we are still. 

Yet, these concourses of elements,
Fearful of our atemporality,
Reach inside with adroit malignance
And wind us tight again
With revolutions of fear and offense
Till, swinging again in gaping arcs,
Either I am sending you messages 
With no hope of response 
Or you are planning on dragging me 
To the east coast against my will. 

Still I know that we are not merely cogs 
Impelled by the batteries of fate
To mesh together with the least of our circumference
Only to push one another off and away again.
For I have often shriven the past
And, in-between dreaming and spare time,
Rearranged memories and hopes so that
Our first hug, longed-for more than sex,
Comes after teaching Caitlin to read or Dallin to dance
And so that I can look forward again
To a night spread out on the hill
Where I made a game of laughing
And tickled you with sultry, white flowers. 

If we can bend the hours and days so,
Let us stop speaking in the conditional tense
And make time the blank pages
Of a book bound by nothing
So that, with ink laid down
By our synchronized hands,
We answer only to ourselves
And our dreams.

- Clancy Clawson