Requiem

The angels I love
bicker over cod guts and snapper spines.
They joust for flounder skulls and pick the bones clean,
screaming. Their harsh, fine voices
break across my town
in a language lost to my kind,
thoughtless in the clear now of now
without death. Christ, walk down streets paved
with rain to me and you drown in my choir,
my angels beating prayer under wing
which is the want I have not loved
well. Where did my weather go? Meet me
where my hidden weather went,
where praise and rain
are never spent.







"Requiem" is from a sequence titled "Hard Weather Prayers."

Source: Poetry (January 2009)