COLD ANGEL OF MERCY

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54 Home It’s clarity, like the beech, still ghost among the pines, or a kiss, though not the first kiss, the over-glamourized kiss of one’s self, but the one thousand and first kiss that glides so easily along the breastbone then downward, like a springflow to the navel, determined but not cold, the kiss of summer and darkening roses. It is the gathering of buzzards on high tension towers, and the moment you think, why, there are even angels for eating the dead! Or remember your most lonely loneliness, the cruelest jilting, or the worst lie and so the knowing better than to believe ever again the lover’s assurances of love. It is the way sometimes nothing happens, or that long lost moment when we first crawled blindly out of the sea’s black cuff—that old sleight-of-hand— and the ache of never wanting to go back, tender and unshining as we are. ...