Sailors have always been confused about how to determine longitude, that is, how far east or west you are on the ocean. In the 1700s John Harrison built a series of seagoing clocks that were meant to solve this problem by calculating speed against time. This is the clock on the first sea trial.
I will keep the time. With furious and astronomical precision | I will keep the time. And they’ve set me in | a box and I’ll reach out my arms across continents | and wrench them together and then you’ll know how far | west of the Azores you are, by nature and reason | and Deist God—it all goes in a circle really | the earth flows around magellanic just like the hands on | my face flow around it all comes back what’s time | to a clock I move forward to get back to | where I started like doing laundry getting dirty again every | time I stand still and everything else swirls around me | even the sea even the swilling swinging sea won’t bend | me just move around me I am a brass continent | unmoveable by time and sea I am very grand; I | am very grand; I am reason built in metal rolling | even the sea back like revelation the world holds no | more terror for we have measured it out with ticking | brass tick do you hear tock the inevitable march of | the human mastery of time tick John Harrison is Zeus | and I his lightning bolt firing up upon the gods | and their time we have measured it and parsed its | passing into litres and millilitres and there will be no | more sea because I own it the time is mine | I will keep the time I will keep the time.
Forrest Denham Shattuck is a graduate student in History who writes in the spare seconds between English Civil Wars. The sometime founder and editor of The East Wind, an experimental literature journal, he has been published in the EEEL and elsewhere. His novel is not forthcoming.