Galileo
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.
Copyright © 2020 by Paul Tran. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 9, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
“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
Paul Tran
Paul Tran is the author of All the Flowers Kneeling (Penguin Books, 2022).