It's high noon and you wouldn't know it
if not for the paternal sun, benevolent though
by and large mischievous, and the more certain papal bell,
its cast iron clapper signaling to a vacant
and outdated village square.
The neighbor herds her plucking hens
before their operose bird-blood overheats,
but the laggard chick Phaeton, dressed in dust,
totters eastward, his tiny feet stamping ground
feeling for the spring.
Just as the peaked summer teases the aged farmstead
for its tenacity despite another sparse harvest,
each methodical toll of the steady bell mocks the seasons
for their affected, medieval rituals and for their
idle revolutions.
Meadowside the lonely wether Quasimodo bleats
for his mother, who deafly feeds his she-twin.
Suckling greedily, her inbred knees buckle and
her hind legs falter, a result of some infantile,
milk-borne disease.
The resonant and lusty knell finishes, its closing note
carried away by the western zephyr. The stale soil
cracks under the sun, whose ray, thick
and august, surveys the hamlet -- a tragedy
flanked by superstition.
Excused from terrestrial constraints, the spider,
ensconced in the dun shade of the belfry's eave,
defends her citadel, a neurosis detected in the perfection
of her lacework. A horde of her kin abscond from
their webbed asylum, relieved.
The stoic bell pitches soundlessly over
the calloused fields, an idol among rogues.
The predatory sun keeps even the ruffed buzzards
from savaging the deserted estate. It's high noon and
wouldn't you know.
