The Thud of Escapement

The Thud of Escapement

It came to me in the watch museum.
It’s weights, hammers and gears.
Action, reaction. Action, reaction.
The thud of escapement.
The dominoes of a story.

I want to stand inside a pocketwatch
and lose myself to inevitable design.

I want a plan well engineered,
that leaves nothing to emotion but the
joy of cog after cog, falling in track,
ticking toward the unalarmed achievement of

another hour struck. Zen empty time.

And thus our story could be like a watch,
Action, reaction. Weights, hammers, gears.
Little gears for instant gratification,
Huge gears that circle in years with minute changes.

And I could know that your actions are reactions,
along a path which matters like another hour struck.
Nothing personal.

—-Wren Tuatha

Let me explain…I went through a watch phase in my writing a couple of years back. A acquaintance is a writer who covers high-end watches for watch collector magazines. I get curious. I needed to understand how people could fill up one magazine with fancy watches, much less several, and how people could willingly spend more than twenty bucks on a timepiece, when cellphones tell time, much less spending twenty thousand, one-hundred thousand or more for a watch when there are people, causes and projects who could use that money to meaningfully help so many.

I learned a lot. Although I’m still  triggered by their price tags, I gained awe and respect for the artistry that goes into these watches. They are tiny, well engineered worlds unto themselves. I still don’t want to buy one. I’d be afraid to wear it!

But I began wanting to crawl inside one.

After a couple of visits to the National Watch and Clock Museum (yes, they get their own museum) I was satisfied that I had crawled inside. And what I realized from the inside is how watches, with their gears milling and harnessing time, doling it out to us, had become a symbol of my midlife crisis of that time, facing my mother’s and my own mortality, taking inventory of how far I was from my life goals.

There’s a mechanism inside a windup watch called the escapement. It regulates the speed of the gears. I became captivated by watch terminology, and this word is especially delicious to me. And so came this poem.

Join our Hippie Chick Diaries fanpage on facebook!