We Remember an Old Table

What is time? I ask Andrew. Doctors have
opened his skull to see minuscule gears,
boulders, sperm whales. The hour hand, glaciers.
The minute hand, to take out a piece of
the brain, where time is forged by measurement,
the intense craving for calibration.

Leaves do twirl
to music when
seasons change.

Andrew says if someone's slow they're just slow.
The second hand, preoccupied with the next
next, the thinnest thin, the newest new.
Earth's archaic rotation. "Our family
never called it anything." Slow means
being built out of a little more time.