Angels, where were you?

ADDRESS TO THE ANGELS

                     by Maxine Kumin

Taking off at sunset over the city

it seems we pull the sun up

and pin it over the rim

or is it the other way round,

is it the horizon we push down

like a loose cuticle?

I am up here grieving, tallying

my losses, and I think how once,

the world was flat and rested on

the back of a giant fish whose tail

was in his mouth and on the Day

of Judgment all the sinners fell

overboard into the black gulf.

Once we walked distances

or went by horse and knew our places

on the planet, gravity-wise.

Now angels, God's secret agents,

I am assured by Billy Graham, circulate among us to tell

the living they are not alone.

On twenty-four-hour duty, angels

flutter around my house and barn

blundering into the cobwebs,

letting pots boil over

or watching the cat torture

a chipmunk When my pony,

filching apples, rears and catches

his halter on a branch and hangs

himself all afternoon, I like

to think six equine angels fan 

the strangling beast

until his agony is past.

Who knows how much or little

anyone suffers? Animals

are honest through their inability

to lie. Man, in his last hour,

has a compulsion to come clean.

Death is the sacred criterion.

Always it is passion that

confuses the issue. Always

I think that no one

can be sadder than I am.

For example, now, watching

this after-sunset

in the sky on top of Boston

I am wanting part of my life back

so I can do it over.

So I can do it better.

Angels, where were you when

by best friend did herself in?

Were you lunching beside us

that final noon, did you catch

some nuance that went past my ear?"

Did you ease my father out

of his cardiac arrest that wet

fall day I sat at the high crib bed

holding his hand? And when

my black-eyed susan-child ran

off with her European lover

and has been ever since an unbelonger,

were you whirligiging over

the suitcases? Did you put

your imprimature on

that death-by-separation?

It's no consolation, angels,

knowing you're around

helplessly observing like

some sacred CIA. Even

if you're up here, flattened

against the Fasten Your Seatbelt sign

or hugging the bowl in the lavatory,

we are, each one of us, our own

prisoner. We are

locked up in our own story.

From Maxine Kumin, Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief: New and Selected Poems (1982).