Waking Bodies

René Underground

63 René Underground (René,one of the twelve angels allotted to the nine planets of the solar system,receives a grant that pays for his trip to and from Malibu,California,plus all the expenses incurred during his year-long internship,during which he performs certain feats and makes occasional mistakes.) So the angel, accustomed to, and long ago fed up with, his taxing And unromantic reliance on wings, lost track of time Burrowing beneath the unstable clay, cavorting, if you will, With the indigenous gophers.This is easy to imagine. If you received an invitation signed in the unmistakable scrawl Of an owl one evening, would you say no to his offer Of a fully chaperoned and (with any luck) bloodless high-altitude mousing, Even though you had a hundred and one chores To do around the house? The yuccas, who would later surprise The whole of Malibu Canyon with their sudden burst into prominence The weekend before the Independence Day holidays, courtesy Of a not-as-ashamed-as-he-should-have-been Angel whose job it had been (and still was!) to push Their candelabra-like stalks into the sky and paper them with flowers That always turned out to be miniature versions Of his wings in moonlight—the yuccas, who were called by postcard writers “Our Lord’s Candles” for the way they looked When the flame of their flower was highest and for the way they flowered Just before the flame was snuffed and the yucca died— The yuccas, like it or not, were out of luck, And would have, until the charms of the underground wore off For the angel, or he was bitten by a rattlesnake, or the urge For a breath of fresh air, to wait. For now, he savored the difficulty Of movement, the drag of the laurel sumac roots on his ailerons, The brownness deeper than any lack of light That could not but overwhelm him who was bored to tears 64 With the lacy, doily life of an angel and the adjectives Assigned to him as part of his job that were never very far from “opalescent”... The crawling made him dream.The creeping made him weep. He didn’t care that his wings were tattered Like clouds breaking up after a storm, that his mouth full of poetry Was breathless with broken-up rock and unrealized seed. He had often secretly prayed to gophers. He was kissing one now. ...