November Poem
1.
A friend tells me that she has four angels
hovering around her all the time,
and she even knows their names.
She is a linguist, this woman
so of course she wants to learn
to speak their language,
maybe even travel to their country.
You see she lives in a small town
and in small towns you have to keep secrets.
So she wants to follow the angels
because they know everything about her
and don't care. They've got other things on their minds,
like her protection, and she needs protection.
She says she is giving up on humans,
having come to love's precipice,
always with the wrong people
so she's never been able to fully step over.
Ah yes, why fall when you can fly?
2.
In the film Jacob's Ladder
the main character's angel
is also a chiropractor
and just as Jacob is losing his grip
on the world, the angel does an adjustment
so lightning flashes inside Jacob's head
and he is changed somehow,
brought back from the brink of spiritual
misalignment, a word, by the way,
which contains, in its gut,
the suggestion of malignant.
3.
Today the x-ray man said,
Too bad you don't have wings
when I complained about how hard
it was to maneuver on his table.
How I wish I could fly sometimes,
I groaned as I tried to sit up.
Oh, he said, but then you'd be dead,
you wouldn't be here at all, would you?
Maybe flying over Afghanistan right now,
God knows they need looking after.
Surely you don't want that.
Wouldn't I be a sight for sore eyes?
I said, as a hippo with wings,
only I could see,
flew just overhead.
Later, as he was developing, he whispered,
from around the corner, plain as day:
I get it. You hate your body, don't you?
and I had to admit, Well yes, I guess I do.
So the truth of it haunts me all the way home.
4.
Flying past cut stubble fields
I spy a lone tree standing stiff,
and arthritic as I feel at this time of year,
on the side of a hill in the long feathered grass,
its branches ghostly and charring the light,
pulling it hard toward night and its black hole of yearning.
A tree like a bitter complaint, November naked,
and then I notice it hasn't let go of its apples yet.
They glow, small yellow and sweet
little fiesta lanterns, strung suns, teasing its branches
made all the bolder, the brighter
by the tree's grouchy contrast.
5.
Then it's the girls huddled in their barns
or out in the fields, their black and white
bodies shaped like sweet loaves of bread.
The girls are docile,
I see them meditatively busy behind their fences,
eating grasses as if they were washing dishes,
warmed by their own ruminations.
I want to tell the girls they're a blessing to this landscape,
even though up close they may be
huge as pickup trucks,
even though they can be ornery
as witches and bitches ever were before them.
But the girls have fallen,
like the angels caught in a struggle with God,
into the kind of double bind that never ends
as efficient machines persuade them every day
to spend their milk to buy some relief.
6.
I try to imagine angels around me and don't get very far.
I imagine them perched by the hundreds
on Triscuits gleaming with goat cheese.
I see myself eating them accidentally
so I have whole angel cities in my digestive tract.
Those buildings that fly by as you ride
down the spine of Manhattan on FDR drive,
those enormous termite nests that give you the shivers,
the sheer anonymity of them a case of vertigo.
Angels in my buildings unable to spread their wings,
but maybe beginning to organize,
certainly getting mouthier by the hour.
|