The Offhand Angel Poem by Jan Owen

The Offhand Angel



Five haloed numbers on her angel chart
are guarding the stick-figure self
at elbow, neck and knee.
Clashing symbols, she calls them,
wondering about the sixth
drawn-in a short way off.
Is he a sort of spare? She feels ignored.

He's a recent graduate in fact,
with a nose for chaos design.
His Endlessness typecast him
avant-garde of truth with a foot in the dark,
edgy expatriate of yes:
There is this matter called poetry down there.
More a silver excavation, a promising space.
And he is clearly to be shortfall's volunteer,
a sort of default button they call the Muse.

Go to it. He hangs around a while
regaining the knack, language is tricky
as fuzzy maths or that slant love of theirs―
a desolation blooming into light,
a Dis solution homing into night.
He must flatten, particulate, to the linear trip:

Taste, he tries, gathering presence,
(it still tastes inside out) then Touch―
as a tangent to a circle?
He'd sing a site of reason, colour of rhyme
but human energy tips and skews;

the nearest he can come
is a nudge of silence challenging words,
those coupling atavisms once his own.

He cancels distance now,
translated through her breath
down to that instinct they call art.
Purpose comes clear and Birth.
He glances in, wings her with doubt,
the shadow of a poem.
‘Golden pollen' is all she scribbles.
Her scent annoys him, and her hair.

That sideways look. Has she guessed they are
the Absolute's garbage recycling team?
Almost. ‘The scavenging angel sifting
the detritus for truth, ' she writes.
Delete! ‘of truth.' He's moved a little nearer.
Will some of the dust rub off on her?
she wonders if he wonders.

Humour's a balancing game
that even angels play, as humans conjure
wings in a likely wind:
Is this being a metaphor? he sends.
‘Is this metaphor a being? ' she writes.
She can almost see him now―
a milkiness against the sky;
words move between them like a tide.

You are amateurs of mix and match
though ingenious, smiles into her.
Ants and midges, he adds.
‘Heavenly hiccups! ' she replies.
Her strange attractor patterns
praise with blame: Clumsy with hope,
touch-centred, sniping at fate!
‘Recurrence squandering its last chance, '
she agrees. ‘What's more, Wailing
and Gnashing of Teeth. Right? '

But every hair of your head, he reminds her.
‘Time is our spirit fasting, then? '
A bead of sweat on your lip, he whispers,
leaning close. ‘Ah, feathers of sun! '
Wrong side of laughter (teasing her) .
‘Come through, ' she says, ‘Come in.'

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