Painted Clock Poem by Pedro Salinas y Serrano

Two twenty-five. Yes. But not here, no.
On what day would it be
that particular two twenty-five,
in what world could it be
two twenty-five, what year?
That hour is still doing fine,
whimsical, on the loose, flying
through the limbos of time.
Clearly, it was an hour
in which nothing else happened:
its sixty minutes
were sixty long, slow, innocent kisses
laid on the soft cheek of some September
afternoon, I don’t know where.
Until it stopped,
until time stopped and the hour
ascended into what it is now: the soul of an hour
chosen —why?—
and saved from among all the hours on that round
painted clock, that false face, that smiling
measure of the eternal.