After reading Rilke’s second elegy—
Your angels have become so benign now, but weren’t angels supposed to be terrible in your sight, birds of the soul, the ones that blocked your easy path through parkland and pushed you into wilderness? Did Mary wish for the shame of a virgin birth? Did she wish to see her kind son, at the end, a dead man walking?
Can an angel be a transparency, making a simple scene, your home or a mountain hovering over your walk, seem altered, full of unspeakable beauty, choking you? Or unspeakable horror, choking you?
Can an angel make you see how you will soon evaporate like mist over a warm river on a cool morning? Can an angel make you smell the ember of your soul, then leave you standing in the bland dust of afternoon, feeling its vacancy as it leaves your heart? Can you really feel that slight warmth of an angel’s soul then coolness when it leaves the bed of your dreams every morning? Can you briefly taste infinity on your tongue in the divinity that fills the June strawberry you just bit into as you stand in your kitchen staring out the window at your eternal trees? When you look into a dog’s eyes, can you feel the angel in his soul? And most of the time, the rush within moments of doing, the angel-less time, you barely even see his features in your push toward getting work done. Are your eyes even open?
Maybe angels exist in the air, in your love’s breath, or in the musk of shame, hovering over truth whichever it is in that moment. What is rapture? The essence of what? You reach for abundance, the infinite, but in an angel’s absence, find that truth has vanished.
Only dust and emptiness fill your mouth.