The Jazz Clock by J.D. Smith Lyrics

The Jazz Clock

The jazz clock ticks
sometimes, when it wants to,
and sometimes it tocks.
Now and then,
for the sheer sake of variety,
it both ticks and tocks
like its wall and mantle brethren
in the customary alliteration.
Just not for long.

Instead, the jazz clock measures one moment,
then the next, like
the long tidal pull of a sleeper’s breath,
the lightning in a sneeze,
the last eternal seconds before a night of love begins
and the instant that it lasts.

This timepiece, too, starts and stops
with morning traffic
that snakes from block to block,
gridlocks, then syncopates and pulls over
for several measures’ rest, making way
for the siren solo of an ambulance
whose passenger’s heart has dropped
its immaterial drumsticks;
But just as fast as that traffic jammed
the jam dissolves—
first with a spurt of pent-up momentum,
then with an artery’s steady flow.
The jazz clock slows with the thought
of an expanding universe,
the earth’s lengthening lap around the sun
and its gears slip, like a deep-space probe,
toward meeting with an infinite still
until, on an African savannah,
a most immediate
cheetah accelerates
from zero to sixty
in pursuit of an appetizing gazelle
and closes the distance,
pouncing
as a prophet in another hemisphere
is suddenly encompassed
by a light he knows,
this time, is not a seizure.

The hour hand leaps ahead,
the minute hand pulls back as if to clap,
and the stunned second hand oscillates
while existence tucks in its shirt, then moves on
to the crowing of a rooster,
the trilling of a robin or
some other kind of pizzicato bird.
The jazz clock, consequently, has no alarm.
It is always time to wake up.
It is always time to dream.