Water at Night

Not that I understand things.

Angels don’t walk toward the ship, old engraving

where moon throws

a river of light, how angels would walk the ocean

if they wanted to walk.

They don’t. They hover. A lot of space

between them and what

shines like waves. Which can’t

be a choice, for angels or

the engraver who was in fact

Gustave Doré after sleeping off

the ancient mariner Coleridge left behind under

guilt and regret and an albatross’s weight.

Which isn’t much, but they are

big animals, four feet across counting

the wind involved

and rain. Doré waking to a room not

really of wings. I guess

a stirring, something in the black expanse

he hoped to razor into

the copper plate — no, a graver,

not a razor at all.

Beauty does terrify, a bare nothing

but stop. As in angels. Abrupt.

Still, to cut them their flight on metal

takes a while. His hands stiff,

Doré under a deadline no doubt like the small

endlessly later rest of us

do what we do and do until

it’s not what we do.

Nevertheless, angels. Why did they

keep coming, one by one radiant

dark of a mind paused to

this most desolate given: water at night.

That it floods a future not

even in the picture.