Between the Beating Clocks

Cheap, made to travel they throw their tiny drumbeats out in stereo from the bed table
to the work station.  They fill the room
with a music of ticking, only just out
of synch.  It could be maddening,
Poe's buried heart, or that spinning toy,
a shuttlecock, ratcheting over nylon cord
slap, slap, slap.  Or the body's racket
in the blood, the slow tock of sex undone.
It soothes, they do, soothe, the ping-pong
rhythm of their second-clapping hands:
red line, a vein between this and that.