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Bellbeat
- Syracuse University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
10 Bellbeat The tongue of the bell must bang the bell’s cold shell aloud to make the bell a bell. No otherwise exists. What else is every iron peartop but an iron peartop if it simply cups its centered stamen still? The frozen pendulum strikes nil. It plumblines down like double hands made one at half past six. I’ve seen the carilloning tulips battened down in belfries. I’ve heard them rock and creak in rainy winds. I’ve felt the dangled nubs inch close to sound but never close enough before the muting night enshrines them in their brass monotony. It takes the tugging down and easing up on one low-knotted rope to jell the shape and sound of what remembers to become a bell. 11 And gong after gong it goes, it goes, it goes . . . And tones go sheeping over, after, under one another, shuddering in high cascades from quick to quiet. The muffled bellbeat in my chest rhymes every beat of the bell with breath. It tolls my seven circles in the sun. It thunders in my wrists. It does not rest. ...