Kent and Sussex Poetry Competition

Second place poem for The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society Open Competition 2024

Why do you want that expensive watch when all the sky’s a clock?

~What makes the cornfields happy, under what constellation? ~Virgil

James Dean’s image was used to advertise a watch,

just when their use began to fade into the digital age.

Same model, a gold LeCoultre watch, missing a band,

was added to the Dean Museum in Fairmount, Indiana.

In the morning here the sky is cold, clear crystal,

the horizon deepening dark against the digits.

The stars pale at the hem in a circle. Looking west,

the direction the meteor shower will come from

in August, in the right periphery, at hands ticking

where they intersect, before the sun rises or sets.

Hours and minutes shift. Green men, lions, symbols,

rush down the center line of highway 26. When you

drive away, steer straight West on the compass-rose

of imagination, across belts of shadow. Fields of corn.