Five o’clock and American tourists
in tracksuits and ballcaps gather
beneath the glockenspiel clock in Munich’s Marienplatz.
It’s delight to wait for the towering timepiece to chime.
They gape, mouths still slick with milchkaffe,
beneath the daily-dancing ceramic men.
It is nothing like Houston.
It is nothing like Salt Lake, Palo Alto, Little Rock.
There, time is kept with green lights
illuminated on signs outside of banks,
and usually wrong. For a moment,
the Americans have only their outfits
and some inky Visa receipts, long-pocketed,
to remind them of their century.
It is five o’clock, anytime. From afar,
the syllabic prattle of an alien tongue, a staccato
associated only with black-and-white newsreels
of the 1940s, hits hard in the air around their ears.
The glockenspiel strikes similarly,
sculptures positioning to perform the Schläffertanz,
celebrating the end of the plague
nearly five hundred years too late.
Surely, we’re on to better days.
The figures begin a fearless revolution
that does not seem to end.
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