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.






AUTOCORRECT: ONE