Among Angels Read Free Page B

apples,
    plump in their autumn skins.
    â€” JANE YOLEN

Build a chair as if an angel were going to sit on it.
    â€” Thomas Merton
    Angels among the Servants
    St. Zita, patron saint
    of scrub buckets and brooms,
    spiritual adviser to mops,
    protector of charwomen,
    chambermaids, cooks,
    those who wait on us
    and mend our ways,
    for forty-eight years you
    lit the morning fire
    in the dark kitchen
    of Fatinelli of Lucca
    and baked his bread,
    till the Sunday you knew
    you could not serve
    two masters and did not open
    the bins of flour or unlock
    the treasures of yeast
    and water. Telling no one,
    you trudged off to Mass,
    still wearing his keys
    on your belt.
    And while you opened your mouth
    for the wafer, a coin
    minted from moonlight,
    angels arrived in aprons
    and mixed light and salt,
    and kneaded loaf after loaf,
    punching them down
    for their own good,
    and praised the mystery
    of bread, which rises to meet
    its maker. But who
    is the servant here?
    The loaf will not rise
    till the baker follows
    the rules set down by the first loaf
    for the ancient order of bread.
    St. Zita, bless the fire
    that boils water, the air
    that dries clothes, and keys
    that have lost their doors:
    may angels keep them
    from the deep river.
    â€” NANCY WILLARD

Photographing Angels
    for Lilo Raymond
    The first angel you brought us stands high
    over a city which does not appear in the picture,
    yet no one who sees the angel doubts
    the city is there. He folds his arms,
    swathed in stone, and turns his blank gaze to heaven.
    His hair seems newly hatched, snaky curls,
    his wings chunky as bread, the feathers cast
    from a mold like a big cookie.
    When he clarified himself in your darkroom,
    you saw what the lens did not show you:
    a fly perched on an angel’s head.
    The second angel you brought us slumps
    on a wall by a dump which does not appear in the picture.
    Broken from the start, she will never be whole
    except in the eye of the beholder
    who praises the mosaic painter’s art,
    though bricks and cement cake
    the hem of her robe like a scab. Her head on her hand,
    her eyes closed, her wings ashen, she drags her dark torch
    on the ground like a broken umbrella.
    She has sunk so far into herself not even you
    could bring her to brightness,
    though you brought her out of hiding.
    Those years you photographed white curtains blowing
    in white rooms over beds rumpled like ice floes,
    you were honing your eye for what might dwell
    in space as pure and simple as an egg.
    The third angel you gave us holds a rose
    so lightly it must have grown in a bed
    where each rose chooses the hand that plucks it
    and turns its open gaze on what rises and sets,
    like a camera gathering the souls of pears,
    the piety of eggs, the light in a dark room. Angels.
    â€” NANCY WILLARD

Jacob Boehme and the Angel
    I
    A light in his workshop
    unlocked his sleep and, fearing
    a fire, the shoemaker
    ran barefoot
    across the snow
    and opened the door.
    The angel was waiting
    on sapphire feet.
    The shoemaker measured,
    marked, and cut. Soles,
    foxing, and tips fell
    from the burnished calfskin,
    laid to rest on the wooden last,
    like a foot unfit for walking.
    He crimped and stitched,
    and the angel watched,
    and the shop grew hot
    as a foundry. He threaded
    his needle with fire,
    and with fire nailed heel
    to sole, and with fire
    pulled the shoes
    from the last. The angel
    put them on,
    first the left,
    then the right,
    stepping so softly
    even the snow did not speak of it.
    â€” NANCY WILLARD

Visitation in a Pewter Dish
    II
    When Jacob finished stitching
    the seventh pair of shoes,
    his hands smelled of new
    leather, as if the calf
    whose mortal part he’d shaped
    wanted to claim him.
    Five blind bells woke
    the fields at the edge of town.
    Men left off binding the rain
    into shocks of gold and rested
    at noon under the plane trees.
    Angelus Domini —
    The cows were happy boulders,
    and Jacob saw, in a pewter dish
    on a dirty table, seven