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 lavendar 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.