The Key West Citizen

IN MEMORIAM
Our Old Town Clock

There above the trees and rooftop stands our old town clock defending Time, red bricked, island-based, while low around its shore the Gulfstream swirls continuing in its timeless change.

Beneath its watch our lives unmindful of the clock are running constant in adjustment to the stream's warm flow.

Our old clock staunchly keeps its vigil, proudly clangs the hours. But its steady strokes do not change one jot the blue and shining current, nor its life of undertow.

Four faces bared North, East, South, West beneath its crown, a captain's-walk, our old clock prods its plodding hours against the Gulfstream's dial gleaming, furrowed far.

And steadfast to man's mark and measurement of Time keeps watch upon our joys and merriments-foreshadowing and foreshortening them;

Keeps faith with our dim deaths, bright births, strange innocence, and secret sins the nightlong watching them, marking but not recording them;

Marking, clocking our good and pain, our wanton pleasures in the night within the shadow of its faded red-brick tower and wall;

Keeps rhythmed hour-footed watch upon our hearts' desires, upon our deepened dreams and browbeating themselves against the ageworn cobblestones of the town's lost street ends,

Clanging alarm when fires flare, or hurricanes head-in and blow.

Still keeping needless habit-houred watch above the ships now safely havened and harboured in the night needless since wiley wreckers and bold buccaneers, it long watched, are gone.

While the star-and-sun-strewn Gulfstream swirls, rises, shifts, and changes on.

Still, pale and stolid faced our old clock keeps its watch.

Its hours are struck are striking now.

O Vigilante Time, ghosted, lost in the phantomed, fathomed Tide, lost in the waste, the ruin, rising, ebbing, and the flood of all men's lives.

Our clock, old friend, stands there and gulps our heart-beats in its throated minutes, island-moored and doomed in Time, towering its fixed and timeworn head above the Gulf forever changing, and forever changed.

O Time, O Little Town, O Faithful, loved and ageworn clock dropping your hours like gull-droppings in the Gulf,

marking, dropping time out of Time.

The Gulfstream rises compassed and encompassing your cogs. your curfew, your constant cloistral coral clanging, your watchful, ever faithful hours' marking.

The Gulfstream rises. The Gulfstream's flowing. And our time and lives are in it. It is our own lives flowing. We are its flow. And we are going.

While you stand keeping time.

-MIZPAH OTTO deBOE.