I was six. No, five, I was five: my first snow.
I remember the angel suddenly coming together
and then bleeding out underneath me
like I was turning myself inside out,
and then I remember awakening to a white field,
because the angels were always a surprise to me,
the way they kept falling in such peculiar positions,
like someone screaming, or dying.
Like the wings.
Friends would take me aside,
tell me the wings were a bit too much:
Like a Babylonian lion's, really. Those wings, they'd say.
They were right of course, but what
could I say to them except
I couldn't help it, that my arms
always moved up and down like that
whenever I fell down out of heaven.
Sometimes I felt like telling them
maybe it would help if they thought of the angels
as small relief-maps of my soul, sudden,
uncontrolled curdlings that occurred
whenever I stopped, opened myself to the sun, or the moon.
And then there were times I didn't know what to say,
except maybe they should think of them
as detailed descriptions of another life.
A life I was living but knew nothing about.