Not My Angels
“Angels with hearts of olive-oil.”
Lorca
Those are the angels never assigned to me
when I was growing up. My angels
had hearts of sweat, beads of perspiration
culled from the brows of remorseful sinners.
Mine never knew sun and nakedness,
were covered with rosaries
in the shadows of the statues of saints.
How much better than a holy water font
for dipping fingers to make the sign of the cross
a font filled with holy olive-oil for dipping bread!
The angels with hearts of olive-oil lounge around Jesus,
who has adopted the famous pose of extended arms and crossed feet
as he lies baking on a sandy Mediterranean shore.
The word “pleasure”
swims in the olive-oil in the hearts of those angels.
But mine scour their hearts clean,
like nuns on their knees in the refectory.
Intruders as pungent as garlic and
intoxicating as red table wine
are hunted down
by my angels with hearts of cleaning fluid.
Now they are looking at me—my angels
with hearts of weak tea made from a single leaf
to chasten the spirit in a perpetual Lent—
they are looking and frowning,
alerted by the whiff
of olive-oil
coming from my pen.
Spending the Day Reading
Seamus Heaney and Juan Ramon Jiminez
How different these two!
One seems to make his poems out of stone
he sculpts and chisels,
each word weighed for its heft,
palmed and cupped for its shape.
You want to run your hand over
the surfaces of the lines,
to give it the pleasure of the hard textures,
the nubs and serrations.
The other seems to make his poems out of froth,
which is almost about to fly,
which is full of air, and wings,
a whiteness whose occasional dark flecks
are like the eyes in downy birds
who have learned to live by sucking the marrow
out of moonlight.
May I never have to choose
between these two.
May my heaven be
that froth running all over that stone,
pooling here and there
and sliding down its sides forever,
the two happy in a marriage
everyone said would not last.
On a Photo of His Daughter
I’ve never seen you on a horse before.
You look at home there, free of any care.
Behind you, Minnesota farmland runs
flat and far, your hands intimate with reins.
Though urban and urbane, you’d easily pass
for one who’d grown up deep in prairie grass—
or maybe for a female centaur, half
of you heavy brown flesh to hold you safe.
At thirty-six, you’re somewhere in the middle
of your ride. Better than a throne, a saddle.
The horse’s left eye is a darkened pool
where your future swims, gleaming like a jewel.
But this photo also brings a pang: that I
before long must bid you, Rider, goodbye.
Your sweet smile says, “I think I’ll sit a while
longer here, it feels so right behind this pommel.”
Horse, woman, daughter, farmland, tree line, sky—
each and all the answer to the question, Why?
Philip Dacey is the author of eleven books, most recently Vertebrae Rosaries: 50 Sonnets (Red Dragonfly Press, 2009) and Mosquito Operas: New and Selected Short Poems (Rain Mountain Press, 2010), as well as whole collections of poems about Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Eakins, and New York City. His honors include three Pushcart prizes, two NEA fellowships in creative writing, a Woodrow Wilson fellowship to Stanford, a Discovery award from the New York YM-YWHA’s Poetry Center, and a Fulbright lectureship to Yugoslavia. With David Jauss, he co-edited the formalist anthology Strong Measures (Harper & Row, 1986). |
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