Questions About Angels Read online

who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

  No wonder you rise in the middle of the night

  to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.

  No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted

  out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

  2

  Questions About Angels

  Of all the questions you might want to ask

  about angels, the only one you ever hear

  is how many can dance on the head of a pin.

  No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time

  besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin

  or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth

  or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.

  Do they fly through God's body and come out singing?

  Do they swing like children from the hinges

  of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?

  Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?

  What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,

  their diet of unfiltered divine light?

  What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall

  these tall presences can look over and see hell?

  If an angel fell off a cloud would he leave a hole

  in a river and would the hole float along endlessly

  filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?

  If an angel delivered the mail would he arrive

  in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume

  the appearance of the regular mailman and

  whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?

  No, the medieval theologians control the court.

  The only question you ever hear is about

  the little dance floor on the head of a pin

  where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.

  It is designed to make us think in millions,

  billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse

  into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:

  one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,

  a small jazz combo working in the background.

  She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful

  eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over

  to glance at his watch because she has been dancing

  forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.

  A Wonder of the World

  It is just now coming into view.

  You can begin to make out its westerly corner

  and you are now getting some idea of its dimensions.

  As we continue to maintain this heading

  more of it will gradually be revealed,

  the mountain appearing to step aside to permit a fuller view.

  At this point you can see a great deal of it.

  It is more colossal than you had expected,

  and you were not at all prepared for its look

  of almost archaeological seriousness

  as if you should be wearing steel-rimmed spectacles

  in order to view it properly.

  Now you are able to see the whole thing, in moonlight!

  Nothing is standing between you and it

  except an immeasurable volume of salty night air.

  It looks different than it does in photographs

  and it is nothing like what you had imagined,

  but there it is, motionless, unavoidable, real.

  It is enough to make you reach for the locket

  in which you carry your picture of the world

  as you glide closer and closer to it

  over the cold streaming surface of these waters.

  Mappamundi

  On the pages I am turning are early pictures of the world,

  the continents and oceans so erroneously shaped

  it is hard to tell which is which at first,

  as if they were drawn by a child or someone blindfolded.

  Along the shorelines, tiny ships are under sail,

  blown by the pursed mouth of a cloud with an angry face,

  and sea beasts prowl the waves that lap at the margins

  where knowledge trails off and ink lines squiggle

  into a vast unknown, an incognita

  far from the old garden of Europe in the center

  where the mapmaker sits bent over his slanted desk,

  touching the contours of the earth with the tip of his pen.

  The library windows are streaming with summer rain

  as I sit bent over this book of ancient maps,

  feeling how the edges of my own world blur into tundra

  and imagining what monsters must be illustrated there

  far from the middle of what little I know.

  But I am oriented here, encased in a local thunderstorm,

  flipping through these imagined worlds, noticing

  that east, not north, is always at the top where mornings

  begin and discovering at the bottom of one intricate page

  an early version of Australia, so far from anything

  that it even has its own sun drawn in the sky overhead.

  Now that is the kind of sun I would like to be under

  this afternoon, basking naked on an arc of beach

  at the end of the world while sea monsters writhe offshore,

  then lying down prone on the sand, my arms stretched out

  so wide I can feel the slight curvature of the earth

  as I work effortlessly on my imaginary tan.

  The First Geniuses

  It is so early almost nothing has happened.

  Agriculture is an unplanted seed.

  Music and the felt hat are thousands of years away.

  The sail and the astrolabe, not even specks on the horizon.

  The window and scissors: inconceivable.

  But even now, before the orchestra of history

  has had time to warm up, the first geniuses

  have found one another and gathered into a thoughtful group.

  Gaunt, tall and bearded, as you might expect,

  they stand outlined against a landscape of smoking volcanoes

  or move along the shores of lakes, still leaden and unnamed,

  or sit on high bare cliffs looking like early arrivals

  at a party the earth is about to throw

  now that the dinosaurs have finally cleared the room.

  They have yet to discover fire, much less invent the wheel,

  so they wander a world mostly dark and motionless

  wondering what to do with their wisdom

  like young girls wonder what to do with their hair.

  Once in a while someone will make a pronouncement

  about the movement of the stars, the density of silence,

  or the strange behavior of water in winter,

  but there is no alphabet, not a drop of ink on earth,

  so the words disappear into the deep green forests

  like flocks of small, startled birds.

  Eventually one of them will come up with the compass

  or draw the first number in sand with a stick,

  and he will let out a shout like Archimedes in his tub

  and curious animals will look up from their grazing.

  Later the water screw and the catapult will appear;

  the nail, the speedometer and the bow tie will follow.

  But until then they can only pace the world gravely,

  knowing nothing but the thrumming of their minds,

  not the whereabouts of north or the notion of zero,

  not even how to sharpen a stone to a deadly point.

  The Afterlife

  While you are preparing for sleep, brushing your teeth,

  or riffling through a magazine in bed,

  the dead of the day are setting out on their journey.
r />   They are moving off in all imaginable directions,

  each according to his own private belief,

  and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal:

  that everyone is right, as it turns out.

  You go to the place you always thought you would go,

  the place you kept lit in an alcove in your head.

  Some are being shot up a funnel of flashing colors

  into a zone of light, white as a January sun.

  Others are standing naked before a forbidding judge who sits

  with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.

  Some have already joined the celestial choir

  and are singing as if they have been doing this forever,

  while the less inventive find themselves stuck

  in a big air-conditioned room full of food and chorus girls.

  Some are approaching the apartment of the female God,

  a woman in her forties with short wiry hair

  and glasses hanging from her neck by a string.

  With one eye she regards the dead through a hole in her door.

  There are those who are squeezing into the bodies

  of animals—eagles and leopards—and one trying on

  the skin of a monkey like a tight suit,

  ready to begin another life in a more simple key,

  while others float off into some benign vagueness,

  little units of energy heading for the ultimate elsewhere.

  There are even a few classicists being led to an underworld

  by a mythological creature with a beard and hooves.

  He will bring them to the mouth of a furious cave

  guarded over by Edith Hamilton and her three-headed dog.

  The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins

  wishing they could return so they could learn Italian

  or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain.

  They wish they could wake in the morning like you

  and stand at a window examining the winter trees,

  every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.

  The Dead

  The dead are always looking down on us, they say,

  while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,

  they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven

  as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

  They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,

  and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,

  drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,

  they think we are looking back at them,

  which makes them lift their oars and fall silent

  and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

  Endangered

  It is so quiet on the shore of this motionless lake

  you can hear the slow recessional of extinct animals

  as they leave through a door at the back of the world,

  disappearing like the verbs of a dead language:

  the last troop of kangaroos hopping out of the picture,

  the ultimate paddling of ducks and pitying of turtledoves

  and, his bell tolling in the distance, the final goat.

  Going Out for Cigarettes

  It's a story as famous as the three little pigs:

  one evening a man says he is going out for cigarettes,

  closes the door behind him and is never heard from again,

  not one phone call, not even a postcard from Rio.

  For all anyone knows, he walks straight into the distance

  like a line from Euclid's notebooks and vanishes

  with the smoke he blows into the soft humid air,

  smoke that forms a screen, smoke to calm the bees within.

  He has his fresh pack, an overcoat with big pockets.

  What else does he need as he walks beyond city limits,

  past the hedges, porch lights and empty cars of the suburbs

  and into a realm no larger than his own hat size?

  Alone, he is a solo for piano that never comes to an end,

  a small plane that keeps flying away from the earth.

  He is the last line of a poem that continues off the page

  and down to a river to drag there in the cool flow,

  questioning the still pools with its silver hook.

  Let us say this is the place where the man who goes out

  for cigarettes finally comes to rest: on a riverbank

  above the long, inquisitive wriggling of that line,

  sitting content in the quiet picnic of consciousness,

  nothing on his mind as he lights up another one,

  nothing but the arc of the stone bridge he notices

  downstream, and its upturned reflection in the water.

  3

  Purity

  My favorite time to write is in the late afternoon,

  weekdays, particularly Wednesdays.

  This is how I go about it:

  I take a fresh pot of tea into my study and close the door.

  Then I remove my clothes and leave them in a pile

  as if I had melted to death and my legacy consisted of only

  a white shirt, a pair of pants and a pot of cold tea.

  Then I remove my flesh and hang it over a chair.

  I slide it off my bones like a silken garment.

  I do this so that what I write will be pure,

  completely rinsed of the carnal,

  uncontaminated by the preoccupations of the body.

  Finally I remove each of my organs and arrange them

  on a small table near the window.

  I do not want to hear their ancient rhythms

  when I am trying to tap out my own drumbeat.

  Now I sit down at the desk, ready to begin.

  I am entirely pure: nothing but a skeleton at a typewriter.

  I should mention that sometimes I leave my penis on.

  I find it difficult to ignore the temptation.

  Then I am a skeleton with a penis at a typewriter.

  In this condition I write extraordinary love poems,

  most of them exploiting the connection between sex and death.

  I am concentration itself: I exist in a universe

  where there is nothing but sex, death, and typewriting.

  After a spell of this I remove my penis too.

  Then I am all skull and bones typing into the afternoon.

  Just the absolute essentials, no flounces.

  Now I write only about death, most classical of themes

  in language light as the air between my ribs.

  Afterward, I reward myself by going for a drive at sunset.

  I replace my organs and slip back into my flesh

  and clothes. Then I back the car out of the garage

  and speed through woods on winding country roads,

  passing stone walls, farmhouses, and frozen ponds,

  all perfectly arranged like words in a famous sonnet.

  Cliché

  My life is an open book. It lies here

  on a glass tabletop, its pages shamelessly exposed,

  outspread like a bird with hundreds of thin paper wings.

  It is a biography, needless to say,

  and I am reading and writing it simultaneously

  in a language troublesome and private.

  Every reader must be a translator with a thick lexicon.

  No one has read the whole thing but me.

  Most dip into the middle for a few paragraphs,

  then move on to other shelves, other libraries.

  Some have time only for the illustrations.

  I love to feel the daily turning of the pages,

  the sentences unwinding like string,

  and when something really important happens,

  I walk out to the edge of the page

  and, always the student,

  mak
e an asterisk, a little star, in the margin.

  Field Guide

  No one I ask knows the name of the flower

  we pulled the car to the side of the road to pick

  and that I point to dangling purple from my lapel.

  I am passing through the needle of spring

  in North Carolina, as ignorant of the flowers of the south

  as the woman at the barbecue stand who laughs

  and the man who gives me a look as he pumps the gas

  and everyone else I ask on the way to the airport

  to return to where this purple madness is not seen

  blazing against the sober pines and rioting along the roadside.

  On the plane, the stewardess is afraid she cannot answer

  my question, now insistent with the fear that I will leave

  the province of this flower without its sound in my ear.

  Then, as if he were giving me the time of day, a passenger

  looks up from his magazine and says wisteria.

  Putti in the Night

  It is raining so hard and the jazz on the radio

  is playing so loud, you almost feel like surrendering

  to the wish that somebody up there actually liked you

  or at least was keeping an eye on your solitude.

  Not necessarily God himself, glaring down through the roof

  while he fingers a weighty book looking for your name.

  You would rather be canopied by a small group of putti,

  those angels in their infancy always hovering

  in the upper, vaporous corners of religious paintings.

  Chubby little witnesses treading the light blue air,

  they look as if they had just tumbled out of paradise,

  noticed the Ascension or the Birth of the Virgin

  going on below and fluttered over to take a look.

  You have seen them too in sumptuous portrayals of love,

  dropping rose petals, letting arrows fly from tiny bows

  above a scene of immense silks, bosoms and men with swords.

  Imagine leaning back in your chair and beholding

  an aggregation of those weightless, buoyant babies above,

  trailing their clouds of glory, casting smiles upon your life.

  But it is doubtful that they will be attending you tonight,

  though the hour is late and the music has become so slow