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THE CLOCK IN THE WELL
I must scribble a note about the sow that ate the dead baby, the gnawed gristle in the straw, a hand, a foot. "Her name was Fénice, the sow." The ceiling—I am up against it. Feet go over me, the staccato of heels, the glissando of bare soles. A creature of earth, I age fast, squandering my energy skyward, outstripping myself by thirty-five years. In nineteen-sixty-two, when chronometry became an exact science, a clock at the bottom of a water tower was found to run slower than a clock at the top. "The baby was born over and over. It was given no name." Understand this now: I am wearing the black suede gloves of sleep, and there under the moonlit palmettos of Les Sablettes is Bob Pépin suggesting I write the double suicide— Le Vieux et la Vieille, eux aussi ils assistaient à l'accouchement de la Sainte Mère —white-haired Bro and Sis who kept the candy store—the gob-stoppers, the aniseed balls, the licorice shoelaces— and who stepped hand in hand off the counter with their necks in nooses after a long life in a shared bed. They turned in the air like braided onions, like smoked hams. Finger by finger I ease off the gloves and toss them into the papery debris of palm leaves and mimosa dust. At the bottom of every well ticks a slow clock.
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