Your watch stopped at 3:47, the exact minute your heart did.
I wear it anyway, this dead timepiece, this circle of gold
that pressed against your wrist for sixty years.
It sits heavier on mine, a perfect circle of your absence.
When I wind it, this futile resurrection attempt,
I swear I can smell your cologne, that spiced cedar
you dabbed on your neck every morning before first light.
Some nights I press its face against my cheek
and whisper the words I never said aloud.
Your daughter asks why I keep broken things.
I don’t tell her that broken is precisely the point,
how this watch tells the truth no working clock can:
that time stopped for you while continuing for the rest of us,
this impossible physics of grief.
In the drawer, your reading glasses,
your pocketknife with one blade missing,
your handkerchief still creased from your final folding.
I arrange these relics in rows some nights, this museum of you.
The archaeologists who find them centuries from now
won’t know what to make of this worship of the ordinary,
how a dead watch can keep perfect time in the language of memory,
how your absence fills a room more completely than your presence ever could.
“Inherited Objects” — Written in Patricia Smith’s powerful, direct style with its unflinching emotional honesty. The poem centers on a stopped watch and other inherited items as vessels of memory and grief.
Painfully beautiful.