When a Watch Travels in Time
My dad, forever frugal, would be aghast
if he only knew how much
this new wristwatch cost,
when my old twenty-dollar Casio
was still able to do the job.
He would have never believed
my newfound love for the horology of it all,
a mesmerizing whirl of a wheel, oscillating
and a wound-up spiraled spring
moving antiquated toothy barrels
like a merry-go-round.
We should have known that time was never linear
long before we learned to measure it
with atoms colliding in an unseen dark of space
and a grain sized quartz crystal — much more accurate
and economical than my hand-wound relic.
But a battery-powered thing is much too precise
to measure seconds that can somehow slow and dilate
like when his face swelled a submariner blue,
those micro-moments before he suddenly died,
or when the ticks of a clock melt and decay
like a teaspoon of unstable particles
crumbling as we stood unmoving
and dared not look
at his mortician-enameled face,
and five hours were swept away in seconds.
And how I would get dragged back
to those last few moments with him
by just looking down at my wrist
at the watch I will never wear again.
Dr. Sumit Parikh is an emerging poet from Cleveland, OH. His work draws on his experiences as a pediatric neurologist and a father. He has previously been featured by the I-70 Review, Flipped Mitten, Akewi, Odessa Collective and Intima amongst others. Some of his work can be seen at sumitspoetry.com.