UNSEEN

Angels when they descend to Earth
Make bodies for themselves. Usually,
Condensed air is their medium
But almost anything will do. Sand
Has been used, as well as wheat, pipestems,
Shadows and hand-polished anthracite coal.
There is an angel I have heard of
Who makes himself from abstractions
Running God's errands made of sharpness
Or vain regret. He only once clad himself
In Time which left him chronophobic
For some centuries. Another angel,
Called Hatif, has never been embodied
But comes merely as a voice. Accordingly,
If you were awake at three this morning
And, looking casually from your window,
You saw an angel in the alleyway
Behind your building, his half-furled wings
Almost brushing the walls on both sides
As he accepted a drink from the bottle
Extended towards him by a dirty hand
That was certainly not Hatif. The voice
From nowhere which shouted in your ear
"This is not a show -- go back to bed"?
That was Hatif.

DISPATCHES

The battery's power is dwindling
My fingers are too fat for the keyboard
So I type one letter after another
Hoping that if I go through the motions
Some muse will come (not my usual one --
She is someplace warm, where lights still work --
But one who does odd jobs, trying to look ethereal
While she blows on her hands to keep them warm)
From the dining room I hear a voice cry: Dead!
Not Great Pan this time but the lantern.

      

     And, without warning a trapdoor whose existence you’d not suspected slides back before your feet and, while you don’t topple in, you find yourself peering into an uncomfortably deep abyss which represents all that is lacking in you. Let’s not exaggerate; though you’re seized with a sickening sense of vertigo, the abyss is not bottomless. It is simply very deep. If you were to kick a stone into it, you might then leave and plant, say, a field of wheat and tend it to maturity and reap it with an old-fashioned sickle. The wheat could then be ground at a mill, and a loaf or two of bread made from the flour. When you finished a sandwich made from one of the loaves, you could amble back to the abyss where you might have ample time to wait before you heard the very ghost of an echo of the sound the stone made when it rattled against the bottom. See? Not bottomless at all.