The Bells by George Moore

             Ventspils, Latvia

Wherever and whenever
that iron sound sings through
a morning air, across the square
in Ventspils, down an avenue
in Westfield, the ring sinks
deep and desires to pull back
the cloud covering time.

Sunday in a Latvian market town
cobbled streets torn by Soviet time,
the Lutheran Church then
a town hall. The market
sparse but the vegetables round,
bright, and reflected now
off the coal-colored river.

Way back before this edge
of things recalled, deeper
into the calling up of needs
as dreams not quite constructed,
another street with Sunday couples
and tall, branchless trees
on a parkway to a Congregational
white steeple.

Now bells ring with a certain clarity
in their instant, of course, but
it notes something other, something more,
that message a signal, a light in the air.
But memory does them one better.
They perform at the center
of a sudden split in time,

sound invented and refined,
the iron of a dozen places pointed
into a single needle of now.
The bells are sound’s dead weight,
the body of the day, a boat
untilled on a fast-flowing river.
The bells break the monotony of now
into then, or maybe, or
what we might have said.