Consider the bell
ringer as an image
of the human soul,
he stands foursquare
on the stone flagged
ground, and surrounded
by a circle of communal
concentration
searches in his fixed
aloneness
for a world
beyond straight,
human,
eye to eye
discourse,
in this case
above him,
the collision of metal
worlds chiming
to each bend and lift
of the knees,
letting his weight
bear down
on the rope,
creating out of the heave
and upward pull,
a hollowed out
brass utterance,
a resonant
on-going argument
for his continued presence,
independent
of daily mood
or the necessities
for a verbal
proclamation.
Consider the reason
for his continued
attendance
to the art.
Caught in a committed
circle of constant practice
yet freed in the vertical
from a horizontal
ever present
and exhausting
human participation,
the ultimate arbitration
an over arching,
straight-out
relationship
with sound.
Somewhere above
in the vertical
he touches
another firmament,
his face
lined, preoccupied
or even set
against the world,
can still announce joy
in the sweet resonance
of birth,
or drama
in the long,
extended,
over and over
carillions of
marriage.
No matter
the clarity
or cloudiness
of the day,
he can follow
that out-going tide
of sound right
to the very edge
of the circled
horizon
until it ebbs back
around him
into the center
of things,
pooling
to a more
rhythmic toll,
a deeper,
more concentrated
commemoration,
the knelling way
the world sounds
inside
when
we’ve heard
the ease and release
of a last breath.
Let him stand there
then
for the human soul,
let his weight
come true on the rope,
the way we want to lean
into the center of things,
the way we want to
fall with the gravity
of the situation
and then afterwards
laugh and
defy it with an
upward ultimately
untraceable flight,
a great ungovernable
ringing
announcement
to the world
that
something, somewhere,
has changed.
Consider
the bellringer
as one of us,
attempting some
unachieved,
magnificent
difference in the world,
far above
and far beyond
the stone-closed
space
we seem
to occupy.
Below
we’re all
effort, listening
and willful concentration,
above,
like a moving sea,
another power
shoulders
just for a moment
the whole burden,
lifts us
against our will,
lets us find
in the skyward pull
a needed antidote
to surface noise,
a gravity against gravity,
a sky shot through stone, a clear note,
another way to hear
amid
the clamor of the heavens.
-from Everything is Waiting for You
I am there, with the bell ringer. In my whole body. Transported. Thank you.
Thank you for this beautifully painted portrait of a ringer.