Particular Angel
Angels in oscillation,
the quiet screaming of a trillion breaths,
their infinitesimal footfall
sounding like rain's clever patter.
Angels for every occasion,
in business suits and vast arenas,
always a light to be lit
or sin to be accounted for,
the soul's abbreviations
underlined in holiday-red.
And your particular angel,
eyes like water drops
and assigned to watch you sleeping,
a prettified celestial outcast
bound to a brief life's connotations.
Always an inch aside
and donning questionable apparel.
The angel at the foot of your bed,
her sighs that last millennia,
shaking the pollen from her perfect head,
your cataclysmic slumbering
causing fire to burn and much concern,
all those petty thoughts of yours,
all those bodily perforations
and sores of oozing soul-matter.
The one who wakes you
five times a night,
a scented hand plumping a pillow
and another under the bedcovers
tugging the come-along of the flesh,
dispatching pathogens and sex,
envious of the gifts of death and dying.
-------------------------------------------------------
Night Falls
Evening, and the Earth gets smaller.
The elements settle their quarrels.
The angels get out of their heads.
Blue whales croon. Otters submit to entropy.
Starlight jostles for position, long-gone
messengers in the throes of exegesis.
It's the hour of black words on empurpled paper.
It's the minute of the digital glitch.
Now is the source of the next forever.
Evening's tight-lipped solemnity and tolerable stillness,
approximate sea level with a touch of rapture.
The moon attends to its scarred cheek.
We hear music on Regulus. A name on Mercury.
The voice of the sunset humming lyrically.
Just this moment, nothing less or more.
Nature screwing with the temperature.
Couples strolling along a riverside.
The thing that you would dare call God
muffling its laughter.
Evening, light and dark addressing imbalance.
When lovers laugh at locksmiths,
moonrise a broken dish, clouds for dinner,
winds sighing like a Sumerian princess
enamoured of a poet-philosopher.
When the door of the earth comes open.
Venus peering over her parapet.
Mars blushing and in want of war.
Titans gone under the bedcovers.
The world scorched with mankind's industry.
Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. The winner of the 2020 Libretto prize and author of four poetry collections and seven chapbooks, his poems have been broadcast and performed globally.
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