Standish Library

A Poem

By AIDAN FITZSIMONS

There is a tall clock on the front wall

Facing all of Standish Library

Does not tick or seem to move at all

It does when you don’t look

But the time is often off

A giant sun shape

Brass, gold, dull, heavy, painted, fake

The clock is as long as me

But it never expands or shines or changes or burns

Which is how you know it is not me

And not the sun, see

Even though I know it’s fake

It feels imperial, definitive

Its rays radiate evenly pointing

In rectangles imperfectly integrating

Striving to define an unreachable sine

The edge of time

There is only one time on the clock in Standish Library,

And it is the wrong time

Time is on the shelves in Standish Library

Time is hidden in underlines within the hundreds of books

Lining the walls that do not face the clock

There is lots of time here

I wish I had time to live it all

I know time when I feel myself severed from it

I know messianic time when I feel myself saved from it, now

Sharply, from then, in painful shards

There are shards of messianic time hidden away from the golden clock

Effacing all of Standish Library

And maybe I will find them

If I can find the time

There might not be enough

For me to save, for

In time, I will die.

What does it mean,

The suicide, or murder, of Walter Benjamin?

I wonder if the lost manuscript, destroyed by history or himself,

Is findable again, by my mind mining

Hourglass grains of unshining sand in sand

Scattered here, in Standish Library,

Shattered to pieces.

Aidan Fitzsimons ‘20 (aidan_fitzsimons@college.harvard.edu) has lots of time left.