Malice of Bells (old, really old, 20 years old)

There go the bells again, the ice cream truck
braking in the cul-de-sac. A tune repeats
through the gunmetal horn, the timbre papery, crackling,
the oldest sound in the world. You'd think the peal

would end, until it wedges in the neighborhood,
floats through corridors from which plaster falls,
eavesdrops on uneasy conversations. Then bell-notes
lose themselves through sprays of goldenrod
in the city graveyard behind this hill of apartments.

Slanting from erosion, headstones lose their names
in slate that flakes to weeds. The dead
shake from the tremors of the subway. No one hears
the keeper rattling his shackled gates wrapped in chain.
A filthy wind insures the plainest flowers spread.
No one notices a single visitor with a wreath.

Our future a hillside eroding into the graveyard,
the rise of rents or masonry to retain the soil
cannot keep us from the equilibrium land desires.

Good Humor's clarion roams through this periphery
of buildings that will drop in fields of weeds
and break apart from layers of weight
while faceless headstones nod to the soil's whim.

The vendor hands a line of fatigued boys oases
that melt upon each tongue, a small mirage.
When mothers bear their youngest to the line
they are really leading them from infancy

into the cash nexus, the wet kiss
of a vanilla cone, the shucked paper shells
stuck to curbstone like the fronds of sea-plants.

Reflections of warped noise
trail the vendor as he trawls another gullible street.
Since the sound is less than what it was, it spells
remorse. (Even I've been moved to ask myself
if I missed a true sound in the speaker's battered throat.)