Sailing Alone Around the Room Read Free Page A

in a while a student knocks on the door
    with a term paper fifteen years late
    or a question about Yeats or double-spacing.
    And sometimes one will appear in a windowpane
    to watch me lecturing the wallpaper,
    quizzing the chandelier, reprimanding the air.

FROM
Questions
About Angels

  (1991)

American Sonnet
    We do not speak like Petrarch or wear a hat like Spenser
    and it is not fourteen lines
    like furrows in a small, carefully plowed field
    but the picture postcard, a poem on vacation,
    that forces us to sing our songs in little rooms
    or pour our sentiments into measuring cups.
    We write on the back of a waterfall or lake,
    adding to the view a caption as conventional
    as an Elizabethan woman’s heliocentric eyes.
    We locate an adjective for the weather.
    We announce that we are having a wonderful time.
    We express the wish that you were here
    and hide the wish that we were where you are,
    walking back from the mailbox, your head lowered
    as you read and turn the thin message in your hands.
    A slice of this place, a length of white beach,
    a piazza or carved spires of a cathedral
    will pierce the familiar place where you remain,
    and you will toss on the table this reversible display:
    a few square inches of where we have strayed
    and a compression of what we feel.

Questions About Angels
    Of all the questions you might want to ask
    about angels, the only one you ever hear
    is how many can dance on the head of a pin.
    No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time
    besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin
    or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth
    or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.
    Do they fly through God’s body and come out singing?
    Do they swing like children from the hinges
    of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?
    Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?
    What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,
    their diet of unfiltered divine light?
    What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall
    these tall presences can look over and see hell?
    If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole
    in a river and would the hole float along endlessly
    filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?
    If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive
    in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume
    the appearance of the regular mailman and
    whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?
    No, the medieval theologians control the court.
    The only question you ever hear is about
    the little dance floor on the head of a pin
    where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.
    It is designed to make us think in millions,
    billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse
    into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:
    one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
    a small jazz combo working in the background.
    She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
    eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
    to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
    forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.

A History of Weather
    It is the kind of spring morning—candid sunlight
    elucidating the air, a flower-ruffling breeze—
    that makes me want to begin a history of weather,
    a ten-volume elegy for the atmospheres of the past,
    the envelopes that have moved around the moving globe.
    It will open by examining the cirrus clouds
    that are now sweeping over this house into the next state,
    and every chapter will step backwards in time
    to illustrate the rain that fell on battlefields
    and the winds that attended beheadings, coronations.
    The snow flurries of Victorian London will be surveyed
    along with the gales that blew off Renaissance caps.
    The tornadoes of the Middle Ages will be explicated
    and the long, overcast days of the Dark Ages.
    There will be a section on the frozen nights of antiquity
    and on the heat that shimmered in the deserts of the Bible.
    The study will be hailed