Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Four November-December 2024
The Strasbourg Clock, poems by Angela Patten.
The Strasbourg Clock
“Every hour figures of Death and Christ do battle,
and Death wins every hour except the last.” Medieval Robots, E. R. Truitt
This morning a stick insect
like an animated pencil
clinging to the garage door.
Innocuous as a fallen twig,
it rode the space between
sentient and insensate life.
Like the fantastical automata
on the medieval Strasbourg clock
whose theme was Time itself—
Roman gods in chariots chased
each other through the week.
A mechanical angel turned
an hourglass every quarter hour
and the crowing of a clockwork cock
reminded us that another cock
once crowed three times when
Saint Peter denied his faith.
These robotic figures might be kin
to the huge washerwomen wearing
headscarves around their placid faces
and the squareheaded garbagemen
of Bread & Puppet Theatre’s
Domestic Resurrection Circus
whose final pageant, perfectly
timed to the rhythm of the sunset
brought giant puppets advancing
like a wave across the fields.
Or perhaps their descendants were
the drive-in moviegoers of the 1950s and 60s
their cars hooked up to speakers
kids in pajamas silently regarding
the giant screen with its godlike stars
their holy hunger for transcendance.
A Day Without Clocks
It was still morning when I went out
to the woods to see the purple asters
the yellow goldenrod, ducks paddling
unruffled on Preston Pond
thickets of sumac turning russet
in the golden glow of early Fall.
When small anxieties flew up
beneath my feet, I was able
to bat them away like cobwebs.
And when I felt around for misery
found it had taken a hike
no doubt due to the lovely weather.
In late afternoon I hesitated, then said
yes when friends invited me
to paddle on the lake.
In our lightweight kayaks
we traversed the shore
gazing up at red quartzite cliffs
that loomed in rocky tiers
like a geological layer cake
haphazardly thrown together
then down through the clear water
where green weeds waved
like grasses in a looking-glass world.
Sunset was such an excess of gold
that people who did not normally
notice beauty stopped to look
tapping each other on the shoulder
to make them look too.
But when the sun had disappeared
behind the mountains
and some onlookers had turned away
the lake was bathed in such
tender pinks and purples––
the afterglow best of all.
© Angela Patten
Angela Patten’s publications include four poetry collections, The Oriole & the Ovenbird (Kelsay Books 2021), In Praise of Usefulness (Wind Ridge Books 2014), Reliquaries (Salmon Poetry, Ireland 2007) and Still Listening (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 1999), and a prose memoir, High Tea at a Low Table: Stories From An Irish Childhood (Wind Ridge Books 2013). A new collection, Feeding the Wild Rabbit, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies. Born and raised in Dublin, she maintains dual citizenship in Ireland and the United States, where she has lived since 1977. She is a Senior Lecturer Emerita in the English Department at the University of Vermont.