Ein Jeder Engel Ist Schrecklich

Every angel is terrifying.  — Rilke

Close a door, open a door, write a letter
or make a phone call: endings are easy,
as easy as beginnings.  Small stuff,
actions we take every day
when there’s no potency attached.

What matters, what makes it hard
to end or begin, is the Angel
of Possibility who hovers on the margin
of decision. Who could fly off with us
clutched in her brazen arms
if we choose a false path.

I know too much
of her scarred wings
and fruit-toned breath.
Too many meetings,
too many flights into
sun and stars. Each time
I’ve moved into or out of something,
I have flown with her,
and I am scared of the height
from which I might fall,
or might have fallen.

That any journey
leads to anywhere
is terrifying.
The Angel who carries us
is of little consequence,
but I stay perfectly
still while she floats
at the edge of vision, near the door,

as I pray for my feet
to remain on the ground.

You long for redemption after death.
But redemption after death is a probable myth.

You long for that myth.  But all you desire
is a fiction.  Here are the facts you need,

as far as can be told
from this side:

death is final.  You’ve been digging a hole
all your life, tunneling away from it.

That hole will fail you and in a panic
you’ll dig another one to find dirt to fill it,

having given away all you dug out of it
as a penance ahead of the expected redemption. 

You’ll keep digging, filling the previous hole,
making a new one, always falling short as you dig.

You’ll be surrounded by holes up to the moment
you die, and then you’ll fall into one of them.  That one

will come out even, because you will have put everything
you rightly own into it. 

Someone’s going to trip over the pits you’ve left behind.
You can’t even apologize to them.  Offense continues

to build even after you’re gone. 
You’ll never get even.  You’re a gravedigger

and all you bury is the original myth
with every stroke of the shovel.

Craving
the cracking sound my back makes
when it’s overloaded,
I pile on rocks and rocks
and more rocks.

Carry them as if they were
wings, despite
their utter lack of lift. 

I can fly
strictly because
if I believed in the harm
I am doing to myself,
it would be
impossible. 

I will fall someday.
Perhaps today —

perhaps that burning, shattering moment
is what I’ve lived for
after all I have said to the contrary.

Hope
takes different forms;

sometimes it is shaped like
the cairn a man
is buried under, the one
he carries with him.

Every time I go to New York City
I always make time for two things:

one, to read poetry before an audience;
two, to eat pizza.

My obvious presence on the stage
attests to the former,

the obvious presence under my shirt
confirms the latter.

There’s something about that burg
that brings out my appetites.

Something about how swiftly
the people move makes me want

to add to it all, stir the air a bit on my own,
and to take something of it back with me

to my slower home.  I shovel in a giant slice
from a hole in a wall and it sticks to me

as close as a brother in arms.  It makes me want
to nourish a sheet of paper in return, to offer

gratitude for what I have received from this place
on the run, filling myself as I walk among the crowd

without a name of my own: just another shlub
doing the New York Thing, taking whatever I can,

leaving whatever I can, and doing it all
at the speed of life.

If what is usually invisible
were to become opaque,
would we ever leave the cover
of our beds?  Would we dare
to immerse ourselves in brown wind
or pale-blue humidity? 

Light would be forgotten at once.
We’d have no need of it,
and we’d have to find new constants.
Everything would be subject
to redefinition. 

Think of us all, for instance,
so certain of the intangible natures
of love and hate.   If we found ourselves plunged
into this new life, suddenly blind, drowning in its indigo
stew, catching only the fire of its
red-streaked highlights, with no certainty
as to what we were feeling, or how it was
happening, I think we would all
go mad for a time.

Until we retrained ourselves to navigate
from one passion to another, we would
fall silent and still. 
Our comas would show
endearment.  Stasis
would indicate a longing for change. 
Language would fail.
We’d be dumbstruck.

Eventually, some genius would realize
that words themselves could be exchanged
for paintbrushes and palette knives. 
We’d learn how to mix colors
and exact our meaning with varied strokes and scrapings.
Every day would be art. All of us would become
artists.  We’d loathe the crippled hands
of the untalented.  We’d come back
to our former lives, throwing back the covers
to greet the day, all our prejudices and pressures
restored to us in a new swirl
of paradise reimagined,
with the essential question unanswered:

how do we draw out Eden
from a cloudy, muddled world?

Stephen
the flint,
a handsome
but somewhat common
sedimentary rock,
could not believe his eyes
when first he saw Sondra,
the girlfriend-shaped
parachute.

God, he said,
and I do mean that,
I love you.

A thermal took them
and they soared,
pendulum and silk,
rocking back and forth
until they landed
with a thump
and a sigh.

Sondra billowed a bit,

and they at once sought a cliff
who could marry them. 

Dearly beloved,
said the cliff.
Gimme a reason,
I dare you, said
the couple in unison,
making
that most formal of vows.

They kissed a lot
and fell over the edge
and they either made it down safely
or they didn’t.   That’s the end
of that story.

That cliff is still there, though,
waiting for a breeze
to bring in the business.
Never has to advertise. 
The oddest shapes
always seem to find each other
and come wanting to take that fall,
hoping
this time
for one soft landing.

Whatever bird
you are

The little one emitting
a slow and steady series of similar chirps

The rockstar melodian
trilling fluidly for hours on end

The sharp jay shocking up the neighborhood
with bully in his voice

Or the guardian laying down smooth tracks
on the perimeter circuit from tree to tree

You ought to consider
the window mounted cat

Who watches everything
and contemplates bringing you to silence

Who imagines you as just another irritation
worth his attention

And after having considered that
for a while

Please —
sing louder

No sir,
no.  I won’t
grow up — I’ll
grow down instead,

into the earth,

drawing in
shadow nutrients,
gritty water.

It is the Goddess of Dirt
that I serve.

I may present to you
a form
that seems
symmetrical
and bright,

but it springs from
the insistent tug
in a holy underground,

and what can be seen, admired,
used for shelter or shade,
logged
and laid out in board feet
or carved into utilitarian
shapes —

what you count as important —

that’s
not the truest part of me,
no,
no sir:

go ahead
and take it.

That stump
you leave behind?
That grip of roots
holding on after
you think you’ve gotten
all of me
that matters?

You come back.
Try grinding me out,
blowing me up,
poisoning me.

I’ll be there, somewhere under
your feet,
well and deeply dug in,
still saying my

"sir, no sir"

to you
with every ring of sucker shoots
I send up around my remains,

a crown for Her dark
and somber head.

I was saddened to see that the search for Craig Arnold has, for the most part, come to a conclusion.

This, obviously, is a very old poem…but if only for the ending, it seemed fitting to repost it here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Radioactive Artist

The radio today
brings me the story
of an artist who builds sculptures
from radioactive waste.

I sit back amazed
and listen to a doomed voice
in full cry
on behalf of his art.

He has
his Nuclear Materials Handler license number
tattooed on the back of his neck.
He has the stuff of his every sculpture in his blood.

He builds his work
from the scraps and tools left behind
in the wake of nuclear weapons manufacturing
and keeps them in a gallery

that will be off limits to critics
for 10,000 years.
Someone has to do this, he says.
Someone has to make these things beautiful.

He says this
and the energy of the earth rises from below his feet
and the energy of the sun closes around him like a sphere
and he stands at the center of our modern storm.

And he will die, sooner rather than later,
having made art that no one will ever see
and considering it a privilege
to have done so.

And his art —
the sculptures
I will never see?

They made me quit my day job.
They make me want to fly low
over volcanoes

to feel that heat
and bring it back with me
on a legal pad.

It makes me weep
to think that I’ve wasted so much time —
to think that we’ve all wasted so much time.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I wrote that poem back in the late 90s.  Somehow, it’s become the piece that people tell me they’ve heard other poets cover most often. And I’ve heard more poets talk to me about this poem than any other I’ve written.  I take my LJ screen name from it.

I’ll forever associate it with Craig now.

RIP, Craig, and thank you.  You’ve earned the rest.

When you have finished
with the art, you will still have
bills to pay, people
you were meant to care for,
and a pile of high-toned words
you are supposed to believe. 

Maybe
you get a free pass on all that
if others learn from your work
and the world changes…

but I don’t know
who’s in charge of handing those out —

do you?

"Shut
the fuck
up, fool,"
she snapped

at the corner boy.

"Ain’t nothing wrong
with having a booty
the same size
as the path you make
in this world."

Old man
I see every day
of the week,
one of the stinky ones
I always try to avoid, is
tapping his toes
on the sidewalk outside
Sunday service at
the Main Street
Baptist Church,

and saying to me
as I try
to hurry by:

"I ain’t no
Christian — not no
more, not since I was
a little kid — but
some one of those singers in there
sure figured out a way
into something I never heard about
back when, back when
I was a kid…"

and he’s right, so right

that when he doesn’t even
hit me up
for change

I put a jumble of silver
into his hands
anyway.

The suicides
gather on the beach,

laughing through holes
in their throats.  Gesturing
with floppy, open wrists.

Weakness
is relative, they sing.
We killed
something we thought
was invincible.

The eye of this beholder
fills with tears — is this beauty?
Is bereavement
just a term of art?

Won’t know, they tell me,
until we meet again. Then
we can talk.  Until
then,

assume
you know nothing.