The Hastily Assembled Angel Also Sustains the World

The hastily assembled angel thinks

He must be more like God than people are

Especially because he like God can’t

Choose to be less like God      he tilts his chair

Back his brown metal folding      chair on its

Back legs and lifts      first his right leg and then

His left      onto the wolf-sized rock he’s using

As his desk      while the great flood floods the plains

The valleys and the forests far below him

And the mountains      eventually his mountain

Eventually his right      leg on the rock

His left crossed over at the ankles Wanting

To be like God he thinks must be the wrong way

To be like God he’d heard the rising sea

First in his sleep two      nights ago he dreamed

A lion roared and couldn’t stop and wept

Roaring      and in the dream the angel thought

I must record the lion’s roar      and leapt

Down from his cot      in the clouds to a small village

Built like a village near a forest from

Strong trunks and supple branches      but it stood in

A desert      and the roofs were thatched with bones

The angel saw no lion there but heard

Its roar and saw      the roaring wind on the weeping

Sand      and the weeping sand in the twisting wind

And woke on the mountain woke      in falling snow like weeping

Sand      not knowing how he had gotten there     in snow and

Warm rain he woke and turned his face away

From the sun and saw instead the warm rain tearing

Snow from the mountainside he turned      his face and saw

Already he was lost inside

God’s plan for the world      again he hadn’t seen

In the millennia that must have led

To this      moment the workings of the plan

He slapped the ground and stood      he staggered to

His folding chair miraculously there

Folded and propped against the wolf-sized rock

And listened to the weeping and the roar-

ing world below him not      life but the world

Itself      thinking      This isn’t      like any oth-

er sound      as the storm stripped      comparison from the Earth

But the angel kept the wolf in the rock