My father's cousin collected clocks, he littered tables with parts an tools.

His house rustled, all the rooms ticked, there were three clocks in the bathroom,

God knows what down cellar, but barometers and thermometers in the front hall,

Three weather-vanes in the back yard, hundreds of keys in boxes on closet shelves.

At ten in the evening, even if now one was at home, and the front parlor dark,

What a ring, bang, boom, chime, bell, tinkle and late cuckoo for seven minutes,

Such a pleasantly crazy musical dingdong to talk about what time it might be.

But it wasn't to keep time, it was the difference, I think, that he collected,

The curious, precise, ingenious, delicate, and different ways of keeping time.

He had a yellow kitchen bowlful of loose clock-hands, telling no minutes at all,

Arrows once pointed at half past some hour meaning death, or time for school.

He bought brass pendulum disks that had swung slow to keep time back for someone.

He might need one, it might go with something he had. Well, keep it anyway.

My father's cousin never could ignore more than two of a kind of anything.

Time and my father's cousin, both patient collectors of each other's past,

Were easy together, I think, each one getting his own way in the long swaps.

Time offered him pewter, French clays, loose hand-colored maps, watch-faces,

Which he never found works for, never looked at, never smoked, never polished.

I think it made them both perfectly happy. They kept each other going.

They looked alike. Time is a moustached man with a pipe, finger-ing a bullet-mould.

He had an odd way of not finishing his most useful remarks, muttering "for."

You take a fine file to the two ends for-" "The best metal in gun-ports

Is this soft lead for-" But he knew that time would finish the sentence.

Over there's a steel engraving of Jefferson for-" What? What? I said inside.

He collected old playing cards; and carved ivory chessmen, the queen missing;

And bell-parts, pinch-bottles, and Volume III of some valuable town history.

Once he pasted George Washington's head upside down on an old stamp,

Solemnly trying to fool me with a rarity, and at thirteen I almost believed him.

It was a good warm kind of laughing, his and my father's, when I guessed.

So my father's cousin loaded the wooden rotary stereoscope, and let me look.

Those double pictures on stiff curved cards, of the Civil War, by Brady,

Had depth, you could see behind the men standing behind the cannon. I pressed

My eyebrows against the velvet rim, staring as far as I could into the Civil War.

My father asked him about the model of the ancestral saltbox house at Duxbury.

He said lapping quarter-inch cardboard shingles was too much trouble. They smoked.

But I think he slept in it sometimes. I think I saw him once in the pictures.

The world he and time made was a boy's heaven: pistols, nails, tools, on a table

Where you could get at them: the Santa Maria to finish rigging, tomorrow, maybe;

Foreign stamps, cat-gut for clock-weights, important lengths of copper chain.

And he was the boy in it. Till the day he died, all this wonderful junk was his,

And it's all gone now where things go when they're really junk, not wonderful,

I don't know where, but I wish I had some of it. They gave me his calipers, yes,

But what became of the Toby jugs, the pewter plates? Who got the three hundred clay pipes?

Time and my father's cousin smile and smoke, no hurry now to get things picked up,

Nobody else cares now about the missing part of a clock, or Volumes I and II,

Not even in heaven, or even less so there. Heaven is a back room, second floor,

Unsorted National Geographics behind the door, so you bump the pile coming in.

The pencils lean points up forever against the nose of the bust of Mozart,

The unglassed greenish print of The Flying Dutchman hangs for eternity crooked.

My father lights his pipe. The bright golden match-flame pours down, rises,

And the blue smoke blows. I am the one in brown corduroy knickers, a young ghost

To them, out of the future, but happy, who pokes at the chessmen, tools, clock-parts.

They cross their legs and chuckle, talk leisurely over my head, not much over.

I ache wishing they would give me the Mayflower model, or better, the Santa Maria.

What if it isn't rigged yet? So beautiful, so perfect, so small, and I want it.

They smoke. They talk a little. I want it now, but they'll never give it to me.

After the house is done, the stamps mounted, the guns oiled, after the clocks are fixed.

There's no hurry. But then they never were really in much of a hurry. Tomorrow.

To them, out of the future, but happy, who pokes at the chessmen, tools, clock-parts.

They cross their legs and chuckle, talk leisurely over my head, not much over.

I ache wishing they would give me the Mayflower model, or better, the Santa Maria.

What if it isn't rigged yet? So beautiful, so perfect, so small, and I want it.

They smoke. They talk a little. I want it now, but they'll never give it to me.

After the house is done, the stamps mounted, the guns oiled, after the clocks are fixed.

There's no hurry. But then they never were really in much of a hurry. Tomorrow.