There's An Angel For Going Out Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

[to my father, in memorium, Robert R. Douglas]

[4 october 1924 - 7 april 2002] and to The Arkansas Gazette


there's an angel for going out

when candle flame wavers

and one for coming in,


in a shifting of scarlet leaves;

dreaming, I was that song

in jeweled octobers, all along


all garnet to the very heart...

the one that puts violet creases

in the wind: then it is Spring


and the weights are lifted

the ones balancing grief with

joy.with


unexpected deployments.

the justice of well made stories.

the broadsheets corrected.


we don't often speak in headlines

of the angels of the end;

of endings in gold leaf


and Sunday coloured comics

I want to think as if

in a blind snowstorm of thinking


through these too humid summers

the Pavillions at Petit Jean

favoring the angel of the cooling winds;


of the angel of returns, returning again

to first beginnings and the angels of light

in linotype scattered and snowy quiet.


like the names of Crosett, Kenset.Paragould..Magnolia,

Arkansas names like gold or diamond mines on hold

we have lost certain angels, with roses bedight


gathering the children on rickety bridges;

under the red clay sun and by favorite creeks or

slipping out of our pockets at noon,on deadline;


at night the moon like a milky quartz

in city deserts, public squares and in the cypress gloom

of old paintings. there was a refuge I thought


or in a Proustian bar of exquisite music.

Macarthur park 'melting in the dark' and our

commentary then; who leaves cakes out in the rain


hold your horses, green icing? ?

here is the melody and the land I lived in then

the gardenias in the fluted vase


when we were at home the last summer,

amidst the emblematic mockingbird, the applebloom

the angel of stars and staircases descending


into the Unknown, the banishing one

of disenchantments disabused; the cowboys in old

movies, the cartoons...like Depression era glass


rainbowed, the angel near the throne

who suddenly called you: not by your newspaper name

one crystal bell resounding


among all the others.the railroad tracks, the small

towns made suddenly infinite as you are leaving

and on the waves, unedited,


painted, printed on the silk screen of skies

by cherished pines and the hidden fault lines,

the angel of the mariners


of the soldier-chroniclers of Time.


mary angela douglas 17 may 2018


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