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An angel comes every night.
It sits on the edge of the bed.
A darkness, slightly darker
than night itself. A mouth pleading
for words. That I must tell everything
about surfaces and limitations. Everything
about the nature of substance:
temperature, density, volume.
I turn toward the wall,
a memory of Monday in my mouth,
and mumble the alarm clock’s command,
that the calendar steers the course,
a Filofax guards the time.
But no! The angel rustily rattles
the chains of the Hereafter, coercing
and threatening, wanting to know, right now,
everything about the distribution of resistance,
pressure and weight in the being of physical
possibilities. The structures of textures,
grooves, cracks, dewy grass
beneath the soles, the floorboards’
patina of silk and hidden splinters.
Exactly the way it feels:
a southern wind, sea mist, the brittle wandering
of an insect along the arm.
And don’t forget the tongue’s fan
of antennae, picking up the wine’s
frequency, deep from the grapevine’s root,
and that of the bread, in a recollection of stone
and mercy. Small, soft tentacles
for the joy of the wind’s promises
of wild herbs having strayed into
the May city’s fumes of petrol and lilacs.
Nothing is anywhere near enough. My tormentor
refuses to let go, insisting
on scalpel-like precision. Restlessly,
stubbornly, inciting goose bumps, giving me
the shivers up and down my spine, shoving
a menacing miracle off in my direction,
like a sudden fall from a soaring
height. That I now must absolutely tear
the body’s veil: its fullness up against the other;
the skin’s elasticity in the fingertips’
orbit across the star chart of freckles.
And the cells’ thousand compass needles
in the embrace, trembling, but having
no doubt about purpose or direction.
And the gravity, which lets the hair
fall down in cascades over the face
and shoulders, sparkling
along the curve in the neck.
And the hand’s brush across a hip.
And the hand’s warm grasp around the hip.
And exactly, the way ramifying
figures indulge themselves
in an orgiastic architecture,
in the direction of thousands of cells,
in the direction of the light of the touch,
where arcades of membranes and folds
unfold themselves beneath the arches of the lips,
the lips’ slow parting,
the lips’ meeting. And the oral cavity,
to be exactly there and recognise
an unfamiliar flavour, the pinch of salt
and vanilla at the gateway to a world
within the world. And the snail, who lives there,
and the snail’s trail along furry paths,
reading the scar’s braille
of pain, and igniting
the swaying moons of tenderness.
The cool ocean of the tear.
The sound of comets’ birth.
The dance through the blood’s hall of mirrors.
The sudden start that delicately spreads
the wings of sleep and opens up
the dreams’ passages.
The greedy angel demands
details, nuances; more than the blush,
the source of the blush. More than the pulse,
that which ignites its quivering haste.
Cannot be satisfied, cannot be bribed,
not be allured by quick measures
of toothache, life’s urge, anguish.
My guest of ashes and wishes
only wants to know the whirl of the senses
and offers as a bargain
a picture of the god’s
averted gaze
in a distracted moment,
ours, on the planet, now.
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