Tones
A female Quasimodo
of sorts,
Hope Beakens lived only
for the bells
She was paid to play
every Saturday evening
in the long spring and then summer
of southern New Mexico.
Concerts are performed
without the restraints
and hollow conformity
She showed on Sundays'
Sabbaths serving the school's church.
Religion was the campanile:
She played in the tower
with the frozen clock
at 7:09
a.m. or p.m., and
She rhapsodizes,
"either way,
each time of day
is optimistic
in its own special way,"
depending on the light
or dark of each particular day.
"It isn't much,"
She conceded to me
one golden dusk
as we gathered up our souls
to gaze at the sun setting
now blinking out
inbetween the jagged needle spikes of mountains
a valley across
to the barren west,
"but it is mine
up here in the sky
where every now and then
I can see birds
other than buzzards
circling dead steers
and sparrows,
flying carelessly
free in the milky-white,
azure skies," said
all
expressed right before
the moment
the sun begins to decline
into the shapeless curve
of the horizon
sixty-nine or so miles
away.
© Mike Cluff