The Spire by Ellen Bryant Voigt

The Spire

In the Bavarian steeple, on the hour, 

two figures emerge from their scalloped house 

carrying sledges that they clap, in turn, 

against the surface of the bell. By legend 

they are summer and winter, youth and age, 

as though the forces of plenty and of loss 

played equally on the human soul, extracted 

easily the same low bronze note spreading 

upward from the encumbrance of the village, 

past alluvial fields to the pocked highland 

where cattle shift their massive heads 

at this dissonance, this faint redundant 

pressure in the ears, in the air. 

 

From the village, the mountain seems 

a single stone, a single blank completion. 

Seeing the summit pierce the abstract heavens, 

we reconstruct the valley on the mountain— 

a shepherd propped against his crook, birds 

enthralled on a branch, the branch feathering 

the edge of the canvas—transposing 

such forms as can extend the flawed earth 

and embody us, intact, unaltering, among 

the soft surprising trees of childhood, 

mimosa, honey locust and willow. 

 

Wood in the midst of woods, the village 

houses are allied in a formal shape 

beside a stream, the streets concluding 

at the monument. Again the ravishing moment 

of the bell: the townspeople, curious 

or accustomed, stop to count the strokes, 

odd or even—the confectioner counting out 

the lavender candies for his customer, 

the butcher, the greengrocer, the surgeon 

and the constable—as the housewife 

stands on the stoop, shaking her mop, 

and sees the dust briefly veil the air, 

an algebra of swirling particles.