No, I do not think that angels love. Not as

lovers do, or as a mother who sweeps

her child into her wings, for why would they

stand about and debate the hell or heaven

of that chilled soul that drowned itself

in a bitter lake? Mere messengers they are,

who but obey. Or mirrors of that faceless gaze

which we are meant to take on faith,  dark umbilicus

to our most distant father in the sky, though

they themselves are full of nothing but light. Flaring

out their wings, they appear before us

and we begin to burn, hoping in our ashes

for something other, brighter,  than we were. 

 

 

Perhaps, they were never more

            than God’s fireflies,

                        lightning bugs of the divine, angelic abdomens

flashing the unspeakable

            names of God,

           

for, regardless of whether they are waving a sword

            over the dragon or the sleeping infants of the Egyptians

                        or holding aloft the flower

of the annunciation or sitting down beneath the shade of a tree

            to eat the milk and honey which an aged couple has just stooped to serve them,

                        or casting living fire

upon Gomorrah,

 

                        there is something cold and insectile

about them, something proto-evolutionary,

            that makes us tremble,

so that we love to see them, flickering up and down in

the darkness,

             and yet don’t want to touch them, to feel the scales

of their wings, the scrambling of their tiny appendages

           

            upon our flesh or caught

in our hair, so segmented, so cold and certain in their grip

            to reproduce and propagate the light. That light born

                                    of a chill that withdrew

so far from the earth at the beginning, that ever since

            we have been trying to draw it back, to warm

                                     it back to angel flesh,

 

painting them as mothers, soft feminine faces,

            leading children across a bridge, a guardian

                        light at our elbows, a ministry

                                    of warmth to guide us back

into ourselves.  But they were never

the human given wings, but another kind

            of being, inscrutable as

                                    lightning bugs,

                                                their flesh flaring in a message

                                                            that was never meant for us. 

 

 

So caught up

in the flickering

 

that time embeds within each cell,

to divide and multiply,

 

that, while they fly and mate, they do not eat;

they starve and feast on passion’s sting

 

and fall to earth only in the dull green moments

between one mating and another, their tiny legs

 

attached to a brick wall

like tiny hands losing their grip.

 

So palsied are they, quaked 

by what they want and want and need . . .

 

Yet, detached

from the meadows and fields,

 

rising up out of the soil

where, for months,

 

they have been worms like us–

pale groping things

 

of appetite and fear–

when they rise, they seem

 

the very wings of desirelessness.

They light up and are not burned,

 

but drift like lanterns on a darkened sea that no wave

but time can make go out.

 

So the eye

flies

 

to them

as to love.

 

 

 

 

© Rebecca Seiferle