No Rhythm, No Song

I remember the feeling
Of poring over a vivisected church bell
As it bled out,
Of learning the mazelike fractal of veins,
The card catalogue of cartilage,
As I went.
I can’t tell you what I was searching for,
Precisely,
In the rapidly-corpsifying once-living thing with feathers,
With organs,
With song.
It was not so much that I had found
Some unanswerable question lodged in the liver
Of every sliver of faith.
It was not that there was no doctor on this heaven nor earth
That could’ve stitched it back up again.
It was that, with the cold cracked bell
Bloodless in my hands,
I couldn’t get it to ring.
I didn’t know how to resuscitate it
And I didn’t have the heart
Once I learned that no one else I knew
Had cut theirs open.