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JEHANNE DUBROW I AM TERRIFIED OF ANGELS In all the major cities they are gleaming on their plinths, white-faced, white-handed, and their swords a gilded certainty. To call a face impassive is to say: the eyes cannot see pain. They gaze at pinnacles, tall abstractions in the distance. Let me explain. I come from an older God whose angels bring the dying of the firstborn and love to touch the color red. They wrestle a man for hours by the river. The angels of my stories wear linen stitched with fire, their voices bright as coals dislodged from a hearth. The new angels are cold. They lack the human knowledge of how bones may shatter like the temple, that skin may be sliced against a paper's edge. Who has not walked the avenue beneath the shadow of those wings and thought, there's terror here. Nothing should be chiseled to such smoothness, each feather rendered perfectly, no vacillating dust. The new angels want to rule our bodies, possess the smallest splitting of our cells. Of course, they carry weapons. Their trumpets serve for bludgeoning. Their harps are wire-strung. Lord, save us from their beauty, the lofty absolutes they choir on their perches high above. Lord, save us from the buttressed and supreme. |