The Poet on The Bell They Had to Make Wrong

Two bells on one iron, hung close enough to quarrel, hung close enough to care — and the third voice, the slow one, lives in neither throat. Point at it. You can’t. It keeps the water honest anyway.

Four columns and a socket. Whatever the fifth one carried is carried some other way now: by a beam, by a beat, by the gap doing the work of the stone.

The saying came down the long years the way water will not come down a terrace — shedding at every lip — and arrived weighing one word, tune, which, in an emptied mouth, sounds like make it the same. Two hertz of away, and no one left alive to say the away.

He loved her toward the Elder one filing at a time, the wobble slowing, slowing, a heart being talked out of itself, until one morning nothing leaned, and struck together they were enormous, clean, and still as a breath no one was holding. On the fourth terrace, a child with numbers in her mouth and nowhere to spend them.

No bell is ever added to. Sharp is a theft from the lip, flat a theft from the waist; either way you pay in bronze that does not come back. So: the file’s small ugly psalm, dust going gold in the lamp and then going nowhere, to make her wrong enough to be anyone at all.

Then the lean. Then the heave. Then the old pace shouldering up out of what they will not give each other — twice a second, a refusal you can set water by —

and on the iron, left for the next hand, a plum’s weight of dust: useless, unspendable, the entire reason the valley knows what to do.

Count, child. It carries.