Galileo

Paul Tran

I thought I could stop
time by taking apart
the clock. Minute hand. Hour hand.

Nothing can keep. Nothing
is kept. Only kept track of. I felt

passing seconds
accumulate like dead calves
in a thunderstorm

of the mind no longer a mind
but a page torn
from the dictionary with the definition of self

effaced. I couldn’t face it: the world moving

on as if nothing happened.
Everyone I knew got up. Got dressed.
Went to work. Went home.

There were parties. Ecstasy.
Hennessy. Dancing
around each other. Bluntness. Blunts

rolled to keep
thought after thought
from roiling

like wind across water—
coercing shapelessness into shape.

I put on my best face.
I was glamour. I was grammar.

Yet my best couldn’t best my beast.

I, too, had been taken apart.
I didn’t want to be
fixed. I wanted everything dismantled and useless

like me. Case. Wheel. Hands. Dial. Face.

Paul Tran is the author of All the Flowers Kneeling (Penguin Books, 2022).

Themes

About this Poem

“I believe the poem is not an expression, but an enactment of vexed interiority made through discovery, just as Galileo discovered pendulums could measure time. In this poem, where the autobiographical fact of a speaker confronting the aftermath of rape is off-stage—in the background, and away from view—the discovery that it wasn’t time but the desire for everything to be ‘dismantled and useless’ is enacted by how the poem oscillates from sentence to fragment until, at the end, there’s simply a list of clock parts dismantled and therefore rendered useless. In my experience as a survivor, I must confess I didn’t always want to survive: at my worst moments I wanted everything to end, and when everything didn’t—when everything kept going—I wanted me, all I ever was and could be, to end.”
—Paul Tran

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Taurus Sun, Cancer Moon, Scorpio Rising

Sigh of the Santa Ana through the chaparral clinging to the mountain. Through the sunflowers at night, searching for the sun, along the river no longer a river. The wind kissing the river, its stone face, and making each stone a matchbook. A match. A book on fire. The river a library on fire. The wind a woman running through the valley on fire. Searching. The sunflowers turning toward her. Her nightgown a book turning its own bright pages in the wind. Smoke the color of chaparral. Smoke clinging to her, making her a mountain of smoke. A valley of light. A sigh.

Paul Tran

2023

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Galileo

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Taurus Sun, Cancer Moon, Scorpio Rising

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Galileo

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