TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

Every fall in many states, including Ohio, we set the clocks back one hour for daylight saving time. We call it “falling back.” And in the spring we set our clocks forward one hour—we “spring forward.” This means that what we experience as 6:00pm one day is 5:00pm or 7:00pm the next. 

My kids would point out how arbitrary that was, and asked questions like, “So it’s 7:00 now just because they say it is?” My answer was something like, “Uh, yeah?” Because it’s strange to me, too. Nothing makes it clearer that time is a construct like daylight saving time. Frankly, I’m grateful that my phone and computer update automatically. The clock on my microwave and the clock on my oven never match; they’re different, and both are wrong, because I never bother to set them ahead or back.

Time zones are something else I had to attempt to explain to my children early on, because of work travel. When I travel away from my kids, I have to coordinate our calls, which means demystifying the difference between my time and their time. “I’m three hours behind you in California” or “I’m seven hours ahead of you in Greece.” All of this talk about “my time” and “your time” is so odd, anyway, when you think about it—as if any time is ours. That’s ours, O-U-R-S. No pun intended. 

Today’s poem is a persona poem spoken by a clock, so it addresses the idea of time in an imaginative way. And in a sense, a clock is already something we humanize, metaphorically, given its face and hands.

Alarm Clock
by Jennifer Maier

Because you seek your image in all things,
               the part you call my face  is round,

though dark as the night sky. At its curved
               edge, numbers glow in the places

you’ve ordained for them. By these 
               you chart your course, hourly, through 

nothingness: twelve candles raised against its
               fathomless infinities, as men mapped

the stars so as not to drown there. My hands,
               too, are complicit in your fictions: the short

slow and the long fast one, and the fixed red arm
               that delivers the morning. Like the knife

they slice your life into morsels, to fix on the tines
               of your fork. How like you not to see

that even I, untouched by time, can’t keep it.
               Some days I want to drop my hands

in futility at the way you equate passing with
               dissolution: each tick a small erasure,

like the beat of your own heart: one  less,
               one  less. And have you ever stopped to think

not even you can spend  a thing you can’t possess?
               That while you’re busy portioning infinity,

each second breaks like a salt wave at your feet
               and returns to the sea, which is only ever

the now —alive and infinite. This is what time tells you:
               the fact I whisper 60 times per minute

but that you will not hear. You and the others, 
               roused to waking only by my screams.

"Alarm Clock" from by Jennifer Maier from THE OCCUPANT © 2025 Jennifer Maier. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.