I halfway thought the wind would still be in them,
but the little coppery chimes were full instead
of spider sacs and dauber mud, gray-red
from the airs of abandoned years and hard as a gem.
I scraped them out with a skewer and washed the rims
of silk and dirt and with a toothpick and thread
restrung the tubes and tacked them to the head
with my smallest hammer, a tool so gracile and slim
in the hand it hardly feels like a tool, more
like one of the chimes. But it worked; lovely things
can do heavy things, like fix the voice of the wind,
if that’s the lesson here, though I’m not sure
there’s a lesson so much as just a pair of hands
doing something small, so something else might sing.
