on a pale blue wall with thirty-two windows,
in capitals faintly painted over, a contingent of characters
clings to brick: a. m. bell & co. limited.
long since sold to another co., the ancient concrete
accepts its title like an epitaph, though the handpainted name
retains a certain resilient charm - one abdominous ampersand
brandishes a cherished serif, pipe-shaped,
in its open mouth; a stands smartly at attention,
moustache thin and trim in its philtrum, and b's bilious ass
suggests it is still digesting breakfast. on one end
of where signpainters' scaffolding must once have been,
c and o carry on a conversation
with the little letters in limited, while the sistered ls in bell
sit still beneath a windowsill, ankles hanging stiffly
over hollis below. only m seems uneasy, leaning clumsily
on its one strong leg, an ailment unfelt by the rest of the font
except for an equally wonky w
in another word wedged in the wall's widest column:
hardware.

in a similarly pale blue sky, awkwardly wallpapered
with altocumulus, a wanderlustrous sun has found
another w, a prong of weathervane, two blocks west.
shadowed below is the roof of the bell, with its single brick chimney
outnumbered long ago by a throng
of mushroomed ventilators, themselves numbered 39, 40, 41
in cracked black paint, in the kind of handwriting anyone would have
while shaking a spraycan on a slanted roof,
with only an eavestrough to underline
whatever would slip from your mouth if you slipped
or dropped the aerosol,
to plummet quiet as an exclamation point
past rows of windows like luminous tombstones, through the very same air
signpainters must have stood in, one imagines
on scaffolding, or ladders, there isn't really
any way to say.