Questions About Angels (2 page)

In most self-portraits it is the face that dominates:

Cézanne is a pair of eyes swimming in brushstrokes,

Van Gogh stares out of a halo of swirling darkness,

Rembrandt looks relieved as if he were taking a breather

from painting
The Blinding of Samson.

But in this one Goya stands well back from the mirror

and is seen posed in the clutter of his studio

addressing a canvas tilted back on a tall easel.

He appears to be smiling out at us as if he knew

we would be amused by the extraordinary hat on his head

which is fitted around the brim with candle holders,

a device that allowed him to work into the night.

You can only wonder what it would be like

to be wearing such a chandelier on your head

as if you were a walking dining room or concert hall.

But once you see this hat there is no need to read

any biography of Goya or to memorize his dates.

To understand Goya you only have to imagine him

lighting the candles one by one, then placing

the hat on his head, ready for a night of work.

Imagine him surprising his wife with his new invention,

then laughing like a birthday cake when she saw the glow.

Imagine him flickering through the rooms of his house

with all the shadows flying across the walls.

Imagine a lost traveler knocking on his door

one dark night in the hill country of Spain.

“Come in,” he would say, “I was just painting myself,”

as he stood in the doorway holding up the wand of a brush,

illuminated in the blaze of his famous candle hat.

I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions

that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings

and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance

displaying their capital letters like license plates.

Truth cantering on a powerful horse,

Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils.

Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat,

Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended,

Villainy sharpening an instrument behind a wall,

Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm.

They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes.

Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator.

Valor lies in bed listening to the rain.

Even Death has nothing to do but mend his cloak and hood,

and all their props are locked away in a warehouse,

hourglasses, globes, blindfolds and shackles.

Even if you called them back, there are no places left

for them to go, no Garden of Mirth or Bower of Bliss.

The Valley of Forgiveness is lined with condominiums

and chain saws are howling in the Forest of Despair.

Here on the table near the window is a vase of peonies

and next to it black binoculars and a money clip,

exactly the kind of thing we now prefer,

objects that sit quietly on a line in lower case,

themselves and nothing more, a wheelbarrow,

an empty mailbox, a razor blade resting in a glass ashtray.

As for the others, the great ideas on horseback

and the long-haired virtues in embroidered gowns,

it looks as though they have traveled down

that road you see on the final page of storybooks,

the one that winds up a green hillside and disappears

into an unseen valley where everyone must be fast asleep.

The house is all in darkness except for this corner bedroom

where the lighthouse of a table lamp is guiding

my eyes through the narrow channels of print,

and the only movement in the night is the slight

swirl of curtains, the easy lift and fall of my breathing,

and the flap of pages as they turn in the wind of my hand.

Is there a more gentle way to go into the night

than to follow an endless rope of sentences

and then to slip drowsily under the surface of a page

into the first tentative flicker of a dream,

passing out of the bright precincts of attention

like cigarette smoke passing through a window screen?

All late readers know this sinking feeling of falling

into the liquid of sleep and then rising again

to the call of a voice that you are holding in your hands,

as if pulled from the sea back into a boat

where a discussion is raging on some subject or other,

on Patagonia or Thoroughbreds or the nature of war.

Is there a better method of departure by night

than this quiet bon voyage with an open book,

the sole companion who has come to see you off,

to wave you into the dark waters beyond language?

I can hear the rush and sweep of fallen leaves outside

where the world lies unconscious, and I can feel myself

dissolving, drifting into a story that will never be written,

letting the book slip to the floor where I will find it

in the morning when I surface, wet and streaked with daylight.

It is easy to find out if a poet is a contemporary poet

and thus avoid the imbroglio of calling him Victorian

or worse, Elizabethan, or worse yet, medieval.

If you look him up in
The Norton Anthology of English Literature

and the year of his birth is followed only by a dash

and a small space for the numerals only spirits know,

then it is safe to say that he is probably alive,

perhaps out walking in a pale coat, inhaling the night air,

alive and contemporary as he lights a cigarette

and the smoke billows forth like an amorphous thought

dissipating over the cold, barge-heavy river he is staring into.

But if the dash in the book is followed by another year,

he is not contemporary; perhaps he is nothing at all

save what remains on the few pages there for you to read

and maybe read over again, read aloud to an empty room.

Did you know that it is possible if you read a poem

enough times, if you read it over and over without stopping,

that you can make the author begin to spin gently,

even affectionately, in his grave?

History is busy tonight in the freezing cemetery

carving death dates in stone with a hammer and chisel

and closing those parentheses that are used to embrace our lives,

as if we were afterthoughts dropped into a long sentence.

In the light of all this, I am thankful that I can even see

History standing there holding her allegorical tools.

And I am amazed at how tall and solemn she looks

and how immaculate are her robes.

Somewhere in the rolling hills and farm country

that lie beyond speech

Noah Webster and his assistants are moving

across the landscape tracking down a new word.

It is a small noun about the size of a mouse,

one that will be seldom used by anyone,

like a synonym for
isthmus
,

but they are pursuing the creature zealously

as if it were the verb
to be
,

swinging their sticks and calling out to one another

as they wade through a field of waist-high barley.

The name of the author is the first to go

followed obediently by the title, the plot,

the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel

which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor

decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,

to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye

and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,

and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,

the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember

it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,

not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river

whose name begins with an
L
as far as you can recall,

well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.