Jacob

Wrestling with angels is a dangerous business. At the very least, you risk frustration, as you can never quite pin down what exactly you’re seeing in words. At worst, you risk revealing to yourself and others exactly where you’ve been, and being told you’ve gone the wrong way. At best you can expect a startling transformation of the self and the world around it, a shift of perspective that leaves what you thought before dim and dreamlike, the closest a person can get to a second chance, a rebirth. Always though, it seems to me, you experience the consequences of trying to access the beliefs you hold wordlessly, trying to bring them to light and interpret them in a new way: discomfort and pain, the dislocation of a worldview.

In this brief collection of poems, arranged around the poems “First Angel,” “Second Angel,” “Third Angel,” and “A little lower,” I am still wrestling with my angels – with what I take for granted, what I think I understand, and what I don’t, really, about family, men, and my upbringing in the evangelical church. I didn’t mean, when I began writing the poems that would go into this portfolio in the fall, to confess myself so directly, to write about the things that mattered most to me, the things I was most angry about, the things that bothered me: I started out writing about Tarot cards (“Endgame,” “Dear moon,” and “Death Reading”) because I thought I needed a prompt bordering on the archetypal and mystical to inspire me. I then drew on what I wrote in spring to anchor these experiments, rewriting my own intellectual and spiritual history in the process (“Waiting on Mount Katla,” “Pearl Culture,” and “Chapter XIII”). Finally, I was struck by a series of figures that came to mind as angels in sequence, figures as forces, for good or for ill, I wasn’t sure which, that are the closest I’ve come yet to really grappling with ideas or spiritual experiences I can’t quite put into words now that I no longer rely on strict religious doctrine (or any other sort of doctrine if I can avoid it) to organize and legislate what I think and feel.

Although the overarching themes of Christianity, spiritual experience, discomfort, endings, and healing are present to greater or lesser extent in these poems, they are in various stages of development, and don’t necessarily all fit together as well as I envisioned. I’m not sure whether the transition from “Waiting on Mount Katla” to “Pearl Culture” is smooth, just as I’m not sure whether the ideas within “Waiting on Mount Katla” achieve an easy synthesis. I think there are too many images in both “First Angel,” “Third Angel,” and “A little lower,” and that with more time, I would pare these poems down further, though I am not sure how - “Third Angel,” frankly, I don’t think is a finished poem, and “Second Angel” is perhaps too brief. I am most pleased with “Chapter XIII,” a poem that can read as three sequential short-lined poems or one continuous, stilted poem from left to right, because I think its form best reflects the complexity behind a statement of religious belief and its relationship to the evidence of history, personal or collective.

These poems frustrate me. I want more time with them, I want to write more angels, better angels, and the opportunity to play with different, riskier, and more demanding forms that could make their content both less obscure and less declarative, less total, because they really aren’t the final word. I’m still wrestling, and won’t stop till I feel properly blessed.

First Angel

First angel fell from the sky

in a gray three-piece suit.

He looked around and said no,

I think there might be some mistake:

I did not come to save your soul.

I will not make you whole:

I will make you entire.

If you need a missing piece,

you may want to try another angel.

I am first angel; I do not exist.

Rather, I believe that I am

salt or ghee, the clarifying principle

of soups, curries, and casseroles,

your own arch-invisible friend of difference,

a gloss of Butterschmalz and ego.

Second angel wears sexier ties,

and may write poetry, but first

angel balances expense reports

and drinks coffee for the preservation

of mankind's constituent pretzels.

First angel will not hold you at night,

and doesn't know that he wants to.

He watches over you and corrects

your subtle spine with pins

made of entelechy and whalebone.

I want to see you naked, he says,

otherwise I will not know

what to pass over, or where to find

and kill your dirty edenic fantasies

behind all that nomos and ginger.

He stole your father's belt

instead of a kiss when he spent the night

at your place. A braided cilice

now slices you waist to keep your figure

maiden, but thinner!

Waiting on Mount Katla

On all three separate occasions the eruption of Mount Eyafjallajökull has preceded that of Mount Katla. Eruptions from the Angry Sister are explosive and often catastrophic to the Icelandic countryside. Basaltic volcanoes must melt the ice above, and three major glaciers have breached the rim of Katla’s caldera. Rivers of molten rock and rivers of water are released at once, the heat of the blast pluming the ejecta into a cloud large enough and dark enough to give the old world a year without summer. The history of the world is not a misunderstanding. It’s worse than that.

When she was twelve, Sophie’s big sister Vivan wanted to be a volcanologist. It seemed the inevitable dialectic progression of Sophie’s life that this would be so when her father returned home, quiet, late at night, as usual and drank one beer. Then another. You’re fucking pathetic! Sophie screamed when he began correcting her math homework, refusing to explain the quadratic equation before she learned to write chi properly, and smoldered out of the room past the figure of Vivian, silent, dancing. He drank another one, she just knew it, after she had gone to bed, and Vivian was crying in the bed next to hers. Sophie knew her face to be flushed and puffy in the dark, the tears flowing from her green eyes, no words, not yet. In Iceland the release of glacial outbursts is called jökulhlaups. In Red Bluff, California Vivian called it Andaenala, a word in a language only she spoke. It meant the wrath of the void, but her sister hadn’t told her yet. Vivian filled her composition notebook with her own private iconography, the portrait of the smith-god Myena-Hallea who forged weapons out of fire for heroes and lived alone, and the extensive catalog of igneous rocks Sophie had found in Mr. Woodward’s unplanted field that all looked the same.

Sophie only told her father about what was below the skin of Vivian’s world once, outside the second and more popular Baptist church one Sunday morning, and the hair on her arms stood raised from the scaled, cold surface uncovered by her Sunday best. She remembered all the data her sister had mined from the underworld, and it confused her, and she thought of it all the time, and she thought about it over and over and over again. Her father suggested that Vivian’s information derived from the esoteric principle that ruled seeds of heavenly virtues he had planted inside of her. In April, President Grimsson warned the press that the time for Katla to erupt is coming close: we have prepared. And Sophie thought again of obsidian glass, the tears, the caution and calculations you learn to perform when you sleep next to the threat of Holocene-era dissolution, of glass-rich ash diversions in the Jet Stream, of walls between twin beds and other rooms, thin as ice between sisters.

Courage. It must be courage. She must call it courage.

Monster Room

She called it the monster room. The mirror went forever over the twin sinks, reflecting the towel racks, the pink terrycloth rectangles hanging and frayed by too many rinse cycles. She couldn't even use the toilet without opening the shower curtain, always afraid that she'd see a rotting, bloated corpse in the tub. A man's face made featureless in decomposition, dark hair parted greasily. He was never there.

The mirror was the worst. She'd brush her teeth, glancing behind her constantly, even with the door closed. Vampires, she'd been told, can't be seen in mirrors. Maybe one got in? Maybe one was right behind her? She looked back at her reflection, considered not flossing, retreating to her room, with light quick steps, her curls wet-dark above the shoddy towel she wrapped haphazardly around her awkward adolescent body. No one was watching. No one would want to.

You know that's a lie, right? Why are you telling me this? It's like you actually expect me to still listen to you, you little liar. You manipulative, insane harpy. You ugly, vain, petty, talentless girl. Do you know how much pain you've caused me? How much trouble you could spare me if you'd just do as told? I know you watch me. I know your freakish plans in the dark of your filthy room. I know you want to trap me, strip me down, degrade me. I knew all of that from the first time I laid eyes on you in that mirror.

You can’t see me behind you at all, can you, you stupid self-absorbed slut.

Pearl Culture

Then I called my heart oyster -

a gold-toothed pinctada radiata

burrowed in Red Sea salt.

I hide the wound

inside my mantle, no grain of sand,

but a minute renegade parasite:

or maybe the part of me too close

to fragile lips to survive

a seafloor world disclosed.

I wrap this foreign

or familiar sharp tear again

and again in sheets of nacre,

tucking this tiny offense

into thin folds of gray calcium

carbonate luminous structure.

Each time it will become smoother:

I create the invader apart

from me and beautiful.

Second Angel

Second angel is not intelligent in ways you'd prefer.

He waits by the reflecting pool and folds orange paper

into boxes and boats and birds and envelopes and troubles

the mirror with these false fire gifts that sink or glide away.

He does not see the complex of miracle colors crowning him.

He believes only you can see them. He cannot believe

when he rules you the girl with no more than mirage in her eyes

that he doubles in all his lines the women who want him,

the contrary longing of his waterlogged heart foundering

in the shallows aboard his first ever fire boat.

Endgame

A game of chess is won or lost in the opening

moves. My white pawn offered as bait too soon,

you knew I'd wage our game like a child or the moon,

I laughed too much at your jokes, my dead reckoning.

Rhythm, Luce, it's all about rhythm and timing.

You're too free and loose; I lost a bishop to the tune

of both your knights and your castle, a silly boon,

unworthy of your real strategy and talent for rhyming.

That may be true, but I wanted our kings to dance

across the board together, perpetual stalemates

watching this play impress and enhance

our own gravity wells: etching your every glance

in deep sea relief, outlining your tactics as fates

on cards I drew you by hand and by chance.

Dear moon,

I read today that being a woman killed Sylvia Plath. I knew it. I read Ariel again and my greatest fears were confirmed. In every economy of mystagogy there are certain rules for buyers and sellers that do not make sense when you are asleep. I dreamt that my lover crawled through the small doors constellated like puckers at the bottom of a scalloped dress leading him through the rooms of his wife’s college apartment. He found her fast at the soft red center and we watched her sleep together. I let men tease me so they won’t realize that I already left a long time ago. I read bloodlines like a Rorschach test, doubled over and exposed to no one. I wonder what I’m trying to tell myself. I remember forgetting the moon once. I looked up and was surprised. Still there. My mother taught me nothing about being a woman. She taught me everything about the precise calculations and permutations of selling dreams.

Dear moon,

No more drunk phone calls at 3 AM, okay? I want her to be happy. I think that you know, moon, that she wouldn’t be happy with me. I’m not asking you for comfort, moon. I’m telling you this isn’t a good thing. Can you make her see that, moon? Can’t you?

Dear moon,

As a stripper, I sell love. I don’t get many tips, but men’s sad eyes still follow me as I walk off the catwalk to the backroom. I know what men want. They want to feel special. That’s why they buy you dinner and call you baby and make sure you always come first if he really loves you. They’re living in a fantasy world where I want her to hide from the fact that they want you to want them but don’t know how to ask nicely.

Dear moon,

How do I say to a woman, woman make me feel like the king of the motherfucking world again? How can I ask her that? How can I ask a woman to be the moon, when you know, moon, that being my woman is what killed her?

Dear moon,

Today I swallowed the sun.

Death Reading

Death rides a pale horse and wears black armor

and canters around the lattice-work

neuron filagree inside that makes you

say yes and no and good-bye.

Death is ineluctable, hollow and final,

and lives in the syncope blink between

sink and floor brought about by too much

sick after a bad tuna casserole.

Death does not change you. Death does

not free you, or shape you, or tell you

anything about who you are. Death

is the penultimate blank.

Death forgets his first Christmas card

in the trade paperback where you stuck it,

then rips and sticks tape across the seam

of a box of books for the local Goodwill.

Third Angel

Third angel is too big to fail! Third angel is released

in a shrieking glass net of light into space! irreal space!

Third angel is what is between us, nothing! nothing!

and I watch his departure in confusion and something like awe.

That is what was born of us, then,

that metaphysical tangle that roams the internet and wraps itself

around telephone wires and twines itself around TV cables,

never touching, invisible sheath eating equity and other assets.

He is insatiable for the insubstantial,

and each day we worry as the holy numbers on the screen go lower and higher.

Third angel wears no one's face: he breaks images into perfect fifths

and dances five markets around on strings.

Third angel is just how much nothing

there is now, how much our revelation angels

lied lied lied!

Chapter XIII.

In which Signora Beatrice and Citizen Virgil plot their escape from a panopticon

We can see, --- but what about --- all our progress?

there's only --- the trapdoor? --- an escape route,

thoughts of now --- no, no, not --- in the narthex -

not memories, not --- silence, but --- cruciform acts,

points of view --- in fake blood, --- old jokes from

outside the circle, --- flowing through --- preaching circuits -

no hooks in --- these gutted words: --- all magic bread!

these logos sell --- our staged --- firewater tricks!

the spectacular --- pratfalling --- nuns in bikinis!

A little lower

In my dreams you're never there.

You've just left or turned the next corner -

Gentleman, you turned your back and walked away,

and took every step I take. I can see echoes,

the wavering winged colors, as I walk your path.

I found your church on Easter Sunday,

only two rows of pews on the tide-darkened beach,

and the cross of driftwood posted in the sand.

No walls, hymnals, candles, wine or host.

I wandered among the congregation.

They laughed and talked despite the early cold,

snow disappearing into a gray ocean,

washing the distant clifftops that form the bay,

and they said you were there last week.

You read scripture. What a fine voice

our boy has, they say. Crisp. Carries.

I began to suspect that you were an angel.

After mass, I began sharpening my knives.

I hunt angels, so I see them all the time.

Relief grew with belief. Angels are easy;

angels are imaginary: men are hard.

As I struck blade with stone on the beach,

the congregants, drinking coffee from a thermos

in performance fleece, could no longer see me.

I had killed too many of their angels.

I became a local singularity then nothing.

Now every word I spoke was an introduction.

I became proof of xenia, the scapegoat

of their compromised capacity for peripheral vision.

I felt two fingers press my shoulder.

I turned, and you were turning your back

again. But this time you left an envelope.

Snow aged your hair prematurely

as you walked away. I opened the letter.

One sheet of white paper, one symbol:

a question mark inked in black.

I stopped sharpening. I stopped everything.

You asked me the question

to which my life is the answer.