Moving With The Times Copyright © 2009 James Knox Whittet

He sat in the back row of the classroom
drawing the faces of clocks, his blunted
pencil rounding a smudged penny, the drum
of rain sounding on the corrugated
roof, dates eroding at his fingertips.
In each separate circle, both short hands
would reach unsteadily to numbers scrawled
around the frayed circumference, his lips
pursed; engrossed in motions of time while strands
of weak sunlight, when the rain had ceased, sprawled

across distempered walls where maps, stained pink,
were stretched out between two pins. He was born
with a fault, his brain unable to link
his thoughts: a jigsaw with the pieces too worn
to fit. He worked on the croft, his mother,
widowed, took in men to stretch her income.
When moving woodwormed floorboards had settled
down for the night and the moon formed rivers
of light across faded linoleum
flowers, he'd listen as trapped sheep wrestled

with fences making tightened, barbed wires strum.
Mornings, in his black wellies, overturned
and greying, he'd shove barrowloads of dung
beneath wet, arched trees; on the loch, swans preened
their dark brood; above his bent head, white-fronted
geese arrowed for the ocean and left pale
reflections of themselves on stilled water.
A tractor brought mounds of clay into bleached
lines in fields where worms were upturned to veils
of gulls. In misted light, buzzards loitered

in moist gulfs of air. He died an old man
of twenty-seven, leaving behind heaps
of nameless jotters, their pages of worn
circles moving with the times. Those keepsakes
his mother burnt in a tidying fit
with ripped empty, yellow bags of hen feed:
dog-eared pages curled in flames extended
by stray breezes making flecks of ash flit
and rise and drawn, unsteady hands recede
as singed circumferences contracted.