Angels are terrible.
Everyone knows this who’s met one.
There they are¾crowding out the air
just beyond my window, composing night.
And what am I but an unlit shade to their prerogatives.
They give birth, these helpers who don’t help,
according to the laws of contrapuntal blackness that they sing,
to death, and death, and death, and death, and death, and death.
And sometimes to a life that’s crammed with death.
Maria, St. Maria. Doll made man and man made death,
conjured by love’s bleak agony to life’s fake stage,
running, squirming, seeing, there, an angel’s
slimy outline, angels’ flickered laughter, intoned into a crater of society
on December 4 1875. Oh winged arrow, sting the night,
the night, the wing, the man.
What are these apparitions that we describe as light
but are dooms? Are they what we see in mirrors
when we actually look? Those round students of darkness
wanting to escape the flat flat glass that shines so
perfectly¾aren’t they us? Aren’t they every god
that’s ever died? Blood. The word of angel wit.
Blood. The dialogue of doom and light. Blood.
Angels! What are they but humans inside out? I saw one
in a corner of a closet of a nightmare, calling, not for me, calling …
it was made to call. I thought I was an angel, calling
for myself from the reeking distant depths, but all it was was
wind, and I an eye watching whirling worlds.
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef.
So many names to not call forth.
I suppose that’s what angels are for …
to not call our names. And we? We’re here
to listen to the not calling. When we’re not spoken¾
that’s when we’re most alive.
Absence, silence, muttered ballads in their silent nonexistent ballrooms:
there he was, a prince of night, muttering alongside, muttering
stacked horrors of silence from the horror of himself, the horror of the world, the horror
that they aren’t the same.
Fools! Flee! Flee yourselves! Don’t you see
you’re not anything you’ve thought? That it’s better to be devoured
by an angel than devour pastries by the Seine ? Let the gods eat you … so what?
Maybe then even you will fall into a mirror of creation and birth with your murderer a
word.
What else can we hope for?
Loving what he was, he became it on
December 29 1926 and was elevated in
1997 in Munich
Let us honor the saint today with our flesh and souls.
