New and Selected Poems

How the Yellow Angels Hunger

17 How the Yellow Angels Hunger There was a time when the sky could still crack open releasing a daily sweep of birds and light. There was a time before the child left the world in a blaze of color. It was another universe, when a pet parrot could sit on a windowsill all night and gaze at crowds of clinging angels unravel in a gauze across the sky. If only tears were silent feathers. If only tears could be simply made of salt and water or rain, creeping down the windows of this house where death screams from corners of every room, forcing its breath against panes of glass until they shatter. For the living, there is nothing but rain— drops hammering the rooftop like a flock of angry birds. 18 Above the wounded house, where spirits gather to chew on clouds and weep for all of us, there are angels. Hidden hungry angels with jaundiced halos and angry fists churning the air. In their hands, bloom bouquets of bloody feathers. Little bandages of leaves are sticking in the wind as the building leans its split shoulder toward the outstretched branches of a live oak, which are always reaching toward heaven. As lamplight devours the one room of this house, where time is sitting still in a yellow chair that will always be empty, the blinded bird in the window repeats,“Goodnight moon, goodnight moon, in the great green room, in the great green.” The world will not stop to see this room where a smile is spreading on the face of the man in the moon, stitched into halves of satin sand 19 dollars and stars, swimming on a blue crib quilt that remembers laughter— a crush of sand in a fist of fabric. Now the birds are mute and hidden. Their feathers float fluorescent like sparks on the horizon. But the clouds will not catch fire, though the house is glowing like a pumpkin with too many holes carved in its body—that let in the rain, dawn, and the chaos of birds. ...