Pivotal Angels

I take my beloved where I go: down icy slopes to the brook which hums low songs in darkness. What goes slowly still goes. Her wrist and ankle appeared to me in a dream, set somewhere high amidst blustery stars, pale blossoms of which I perceived myself a cheerful root. Rain falls in the valley but turns to snow in the hills. I love this world and only sometimes yearn for another.

Word by word we find our way. Her shoes by the door reminded me of coffins or aging Belgian horses, images I kept to myself. One remembers in January the sideyard bluets and on Sam Hill Road dense plosions of forget-me-nots. If we can keep it to ourself, is it love? Antique radios hiss in corners, litanies of better days.

I also dreamed - again - of hangings, and back roads from which I could not extract myself and - worse yet - the painful death of beloved animals near haunted mausoleums. Up at midnight, again at two and finally up at three to walk with the dog, uncharacteristically scared of the dark. Potatoes sprout their blonde eyes and reach blindly for the cold walls of the root cellar. What language allows is, properly understood, a floor. My glasses are broken and my boots are riddled with holes.

And yet. One says in prayer to Jesus "you're just a symbol, just an image" and he says in reply, apparently without umbrage, "I can still be helpful." Pivotal angels thus abound. There is a sleep with which I am not familiar but long to be, may even perhaps be ready for. Tuck me into your pocket then, take me when you go.