Bells Ii - Analysis

A world where confusion grows like weather

The poem’s central move is to treat misunderstanding not as a small social glitch but as an atmosphere that breeds events. It germinates / in a clear sky—a paradox that sets the terms: even clarity is fertile ground for error. What follows feels like watching meaning form the way clouds form, climbing like a comma and attaching itself to worried clouds. The speaker’s mind keeps trying to read the sky as punctuation, as if grammar could domesticate dread, but the drift is toward the abyss, signaled by the blunt exit of the last birds. When the birds leave, the poem implies, so does the last ordinary measure of direction and season.

After the birds: together, but “separate, disparate”

In the first section the speaker lands on a bleak intimacy: Now it was just us, yet even that closeness is immediately qualified—shielded, / separate, disparate. The tone is simultaneously communal and estranged, like people huddling during an emergency while not fully trusting one another. The line It almost seems— / and yet it doesn't dramatizes a mind catching itself in the act of concluding, then withdrawing the conclusion. That hesitation matters: the poem won’t let the speaker claim stable knowledge, only the feeling of being hemmed in by consequences.

Broken glass, offenses, and the ordinary catastrophe

What breaks into this cloudy metaphysics is the sharp domestic sound of Broken glass, which announces / more offenses, home invasions. The diction shifts from airy and abstract to police-blotter concrete, as if the world’s disorder has moved from the sky into the house. Yet the speaker’s response is oddly resigned—Seems like / we've been here a long time—followed by the nagging moral reminder And still / ought to do those things. The contradiction is telling: the poem describes a climate of amorality (foregrounded, amoral) while still insisting on obligation, even if the obligations are left frustratingly unnamed. Out of this murk, the speaker offers a crooked comfort: Every murk is a key. The line suggests that confusion might be usable—if not as truth, then as access.

The hinge: “No, it’s all right” as a suspicious reassurance

The poem turns hard on No, it's all right, don't worry. On the surface, it sounds like care, but it also feels like a command to accept the unacceptable, a forced calm pasted over an emergency. Immediately the landscape becomes cartoonishly specific—long-fingered peninsulas—and the reassurance curdles into distraction: they have other fish to fry. Even destiny is reduced to a busy process that germinates on summer sands. The tone here is wry, almost bureaucratic, as if fate were another office with a waiting room.

Consumer aisles, “lap top,” and the policing of touch

A key tension in the second section is between intimacy and control. The speaker imagines bargaining someone around the aisles, a setting that makes threat and comfort look like shopping logistics. Then comes the sudden prohibition: don't touch it, it's a single thing. Whatever it is—truth, evidence, a fragile object, the poem itself—it’s guarded like contraband. The modern pun more lap top / than lap dog tilts the poem toward a world where companionship has been replaced by devices, and where destiny itself takes on the texture of tech: portable, impersonal, perhaps trackable. This is where the earlier home-invasion anxiety meets a subtler invasion: the world entering through systems rather than doors.

“This is all about you”: initiation into a cordoned world

The poem’s strangest intimacy arrives as accusation or dedication: This is all about you. The you is described arriving one cold day with a little knapsack, then crept in with us to see how we could spell. It’s a scene of initiation—almost childlike—yet set inside a paranoid architecture where unknown agents operate: We don't know what breviaries are mixing cocktails for us / in the V room. Prayer books become bartenders; devotion becomes intoxication; someone is preparing experiences for the group, and the group doesn’t consent. The insistence that It's essential we be kept / out of the cordon sharpens the poem’s political mood: there is a boundary, enforced, and survival depends on exclusion—yet the speaker also wants to be heard, noting that Others than old uncles hear us now. Even that hearing is compromised, ending with a jaggedly contemporary intrusion: hacking the website's early spoilage distribution plan. The poem closes on a world where language (spell) and systems (website, plan) are inseparable, and where being understood may look indistinguishable from being intercepted.

A sharper question the poem leaves hanging

If Every murk is a key, what exactly does it unlock: rescue, or deeper complicity? The poem keeps offering doors—aisles, a V room, a cordon—but each doorway implies surveillance and restriction, as if the only available passage is into someone else’s scheme.