MILLENIUM CLOCK

That’s where I was. In the hospital with a friend. Not thinking.
Not thinking about time. Not thinking about how everything

wears down, breaks down, goes bad, dries up, blows away.
Not thinking that tonight either, as I ran water

to make the coffee for tomorrow morning when I will get up
and go back to the office, and spend another day there

not thinking about it, not thinking about it even as I write down these words
about not thinking about it. Like how yesterday

Debbie mentioned those millennium clocks at the Post Office,
saying that she thought it would be funny to have one

that said “only X more days till Greg’s 50th birthday party.”
While I was saying, what a cruel joke those clocks are.

You can stand there in line with your letters in your hand and wait
as the line moves slowly and you gradually get to the window.

You watch as the seconds and the milliseconds whir by
like numbers on a gas pump, ringing up your life.

What could they possibly have been thinking about
those advertising slash promotional guys at the PO?

What exactly are we supposed to think about standing in line?
Are they trying to turn us into a nation of poets?

Maybe they should put up thirty or forty clocks:
500 days ‘til the next time you can apply for an NEA grant,

47 more days and 35 seconds until the
postmark deadline for the Etcetera Prize,

8 seconds more ‘til someone gets raped,
5 seconds until someone’s diagnosed with cancer,

30 more minutes ‘til you get to the window
and weigh your envelope full of poems

all about Spring, about the flowers
and how they are either jumping out of the ground

like little tumors or melting like your last love,
or about the geese,

the direction they fly this time in your poem.