Bells

[Isis]

Overall I like the atmosphere of the poem. I get a sense of contrast between a fading winter (feels Siberian) and all the signs of spring and the coming summer that the speaker is celebrating. I also like that everything in the poem feels a little bit alive and a little bit strange. There are points where that strangeness works, and points where it loses me a bit.

I get a little lost in the first few lines:

This part of Hamburg looks and feels Siberian
retracing chubby childish fingers
along the footnote creased in exile.

Is it the part of Hamburg that's retracing fingers along the footnote? Or is it the speaker's fingers, or some other fingers? I think the idea of a city personified is cool, but because of what feels like an image/thematic disconnect between the line about the city and the fingers and footnote idea, I'm not sure if they're supposed to be one thought, or if those are separate thoughts held in the same sentence. Some clarification here would help the reader get into the poem, I think, and reach the solid images that carry the rest of it.

I wonder about about "the air has intake" but it's not enough to stop me in my reading - but it is enough to be worth revisiting in a revision, I think. Is that supposed to evoke an air intake on a building, or the air breathing itself in and out? I have to reach for an image here, and feel a little like I need to decode the line.

Here is a strange section that works, rather than loses me:

Its scent of apple trees in bloom
is hanging like a green halo and caught
between my highs-strung ankles –
For I am overturned this spring,

I feel like there are two possible meanings of "high strung ankles": saying the speaker is "high-strung", full of anxious energy; or saying that the speaker is upside down, which comes out in "overturned this spring". Gives me the impression of the speaker being bowled over by spring. I was a little confused by it the first time I read the poem, so I think the questions other people have about this aren't off base. Mostly I wonder: why ankles, in particular, that are high-strung? Why is that the body part standing in for the speaker as a whole?

There's a bit of grammatical ambiguity here, though both possible images I get from this worth with the overall gist of the poem:

watching the dusk descend
down my hair – its very ends
I tied to ancient bells in bronze,
announcing summer’s
coming.

"its very ends" could be the speakers hair or dusk, and I imagine it's dusk because that's a grander, weirder, more arresting image. But it's hard to know for sure.