Birthdays

The warning this clock chimes to me,
glass-bubbled, the face within the reflection
of my face, the hands
explicit on the dial as only a contrivance
can afford to be explicit,
           tells me
that my face, my hands
also have time within them,
an insect eating life as a moth does carpets,
and that I too am shadowy
as my grandfather was when he looked at this
or his aunt who first brought it over from France
in the old days before the war,
a war fought more than a hundred years ago–

  –And that the work of our hands is only going around and around
to touch off every now and then
the certain, precise sounding of a small gong
like birthdays perhaps.