By Tompion and Banger

Today he came to take away the clock
that supervised my time between his sheets:
a month-duration longcase, made in London,
by Tompion and Banger; with a square
eleven inch face and Royal pendulum,
a slender crutch, a splayed and bevelled cock,
pierced blue steel hands, a glazed and hooded door,
the turban spandrels double screwed; the cleat’s
brass leading edge punch-numbered 324;
the trunk hand-sorted walnut flame veneer
with delicately chased and gilt escutcheon.
 
Six months had intervened since he had gone;
six times she wound the clock, so its discreet
throat-clearing bongs could now divide the night
as once they parcelled out the afternoon,
when she would let the quarter’s crisper ting
ring in the changes: now a steel pierced tongue
would do the work of hands; now she would turn;
now arch; now loop her arms over the rail;
then by some Eighteenth Century miracle
the movement stopped its chiming for a spell,
till time began again in tangled linen.
 
He left her cuckoo clock of course, a kitsch
Black Forest number made of MDF
and Vorsprung Durch Technik Bavarian quartz,
whose “parasite-included” leitmotif
bounced off the kitchen's Corion and lino.
With deus ex machina timing nicked
off Early Learning Centre’s singalong
book and cassette My Grandfather’s Clock
the cuckoo went bananas when the men
carried the walnut longcase to their van.
It seemed it had been welshing tick and tock
from Tompion and Banger all along
until an AA battery from the stash
beneath her bras and knickers fixed its mojo.

Nick MacKinnon

Runner-up and published in The Bridport Prize, 2009,
Redcliffe Press, ISBN 978-1-906593-49-0