Two friends, dead now for many years,
bought it for us one Christmas,
picked it out of a Crate & Barrel catalogue
and had it shipped with a little card
with love in someone else’s hand,
a perfunctory gift, as ours to them
must surely have been, perhaps a local
cheese, a few small jars of jam or jelly,
not gift so much as habit, like a handshake,
touch and go, and for years it has lain
on the earth in our garden, telling time
to no one but the fallen curls of leaves
from the ornamental crab, its gnomon
a cattail standing in a pond of bronze,
swinging its shadow past a little turtle,
also cast in bronze, forever wading
into the next hour, followed by the rest.