Stan Beyer has been a lifelong activist in the Pacific Northwest. He is currently a medical transportation driver in Northwest Portland where he lives with his longtime partner Karen Hensley, a social worker and his primary editor.

ns 69 | Fall/Winter 2007

Featuring an interview with MH Abrams, reviews of new books by Walter Benn Michaels, John McGowan, and Paul Smith, plus a special section on online criticism.

Read this Issue

Published Spring 2006

Shopping for a Watch

For Fred Pfeil (12/5/05)

by Stan Beyer | ns 65-66

I've been shopping for a watch
For months.
My last one had
A small blue light
So I could anchor myself
And chart my course
Through those nights
When sleep hides elsewhere
In other rooms.
I'm not really in control of my life
But I'm rarely late
As if to be on time
Cheats the dark angels.
Too many of my friends have fallen
In this fragile life.

I wonder, Would a watch help?
I know it's a fetish object
But it's also a marker
Of social relationships
And tells the story of duration--
How long to lunch?
Will this rain never end?
Am I nearer the middle
Or the end of this story?

To buy a watch, I also know,
Is a small thing.
It's a conceit to think that
I could help somehow
If I had the right tool,
Or its absence would remind me
Of my powerlessness.

But a new watch might help
One with a solar battery linked
To the atomic clock
In Washington, DC,
Or in some secret facility
Under a mountain in Colorado.
Some kind of watch
To help chink the windy gaps
In an ad hoc sort of life.

Coming home one night after
A failed foray to the Fred Meyers
Gallery of cheap watches
I sat alone in the dark
And wept.
What a dumbass, I thought.
Too much cancer
And I was doing nothing,
Not even getting myself a watch.

Too often there is nothing to be done
But wait for the news
That will take your breath away,
A little now, a little more later.
And we all wait
As our communities wind down.
What should we do?
I'm not sure just what,
But something more.
It is in our relationships Where we are
Collectively redeemed
And that is
Our only immortality,
And our compassion for each other
Is the only remedy for our suffering.

Each day
I try to remember
That a watch is just another excuse.
It is not the thing,
And it is not enough.

MR BOOKS

Critics at Work
ed. Jeffrey J. Williams.

Critics at Work offers a guided tour through the central, sometimes confusing and frequently controversial developments in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. The tour guides, however, are not distant observers but have been primary participants in those developments, and they report on theory, cultural studies, the literary canon, the recent focus on race, sexuality, and other identities, the state of the univerisity, and the role of the intellectual. Throughout, they consider the not always easy negotiation of politics and culture.

Purchase Critics at Work.