Angel


You came to me today,
the angel with no god to serve.

A remembrance.

I’d struggled through
a strung-out strange
exhalation of my time and life
when the world was alien and weird.

Then a memory of your laughter
as the humanity of life
rushed in
(your humanity)
and shrugged the churning
engines of my mind.

A question?

I cried.

I have remembered you before:

Late September 1892.

A sphinx in lilac silk.

Another life:
A slender stem of ebony
whose diamond lotus
held cigarettes
tipped with gold,
smoke unfurling banners
of our imagination.

Conversation.

September 1892.

Mendelsohn played out
his plangent chords
on a sunlit Chelsea garden;
your plantaganet hands,
a recent bloom of some Byzantine blood,
typed music on an ivory cascade.

Late september 1892.

And many yous rippled through me
like memories on the wind:

A lady in Navarre,
a child empress in Japan
whose cherry stained mouth
is hidden by her fan.

And the laugh of a human
broke the silence of existence.