Free Among Angels by Jane Yolen Page B

living beast.
    Now there is stillness
    on the butcher’s board, faintly hollowed
    by the flesh of animals fallen under the knife
    year after year. How can he bear it?
    On his fluted rack hang hooks, poles,
    a scraper for scrubbing the rough nap
    off flesh ripped by the blade,
    and a cleaver nipped from a halo of steel.
    The electric slicer buzzes and whines,
    but the plucked pullets sleep, curled up
    in their chilly incubator,
    their wings hugging their sides,
    dreamless, having lost their heads.
    If they had thumbs, they would be sucking them.
    Famished, foolish, I am overcome with grief.
    The butcher unhooks a sausage, cuts it,
    hands me a wafer studded with precious meats.
    â€œYou’re my first customer. This one’s on me.”
    â€” NANCY WILLARD

Every visible thing in this world is put under the charge of an angel.
    â€” St. Augustine
    Every Visible Thing
    Asparagus I can believe,
    in its first green thrust;
    McIntosh apples, tart on the bough;
    cardinals like a blot on winter’s clean page;
    raging crows on cropped fields.
    Inching caterpillars I can believe,
    fuzzy footed on a leafy spine;
    trout rising at dusk,
    shedding watered light;
    willows weighted over with ice;
    even the black snake winding
    through the startled grass.
    But what angel, totting eternities of
    poison ivy,
    snail darters,
    brussels sprouts,
    could have time or will for exaltations?
    â€” JANE YOLEN

Angels in Winter
    Mercy is whiter than laundry,
    great baskets of it, piled like snowmen.
    In the cellar I fold and sort and watch
    through a squint in the dirty window
    the plain bright snow.
    Unlike the earth, snow is neuter.
    Unlike the moon, it stays.
    It falls, not from grace, but a silence
    which nourishes crystals.
    My son catches them on his tongue.
    Whatever I try to hold perishes.
    My son and I lie down in white pastures
    of snow and flap like the last survivors
    of a species that couldn’t adapt to the air.
    Jumping free, we look back at
    angels, blurred fossils of majesty and justice
    from the time when a ladder of angels
    joined the house of the snow
    to the houses of those whom it covered
    with a dangerous blanket or a healing sleep.
    As I lift my body from the angel’s,
    I remember the mad preacher of Indiana
    who chose for the site of his kingdom
    the footprint of an angel and named the place
    New Harmony. Nothing of it survives.
    The angels do not look back
    to see how their passing changes the earth,
    the way I do, watching the snow,
    and the waffles our boots print on its unleavened face,
    and the nervous alphabet of the pheasant’s feet,
    and the five-petaled footprint of the cat,
    and the shape of snowshoes, white and expensive as tennis,
    and the deep ribbons tied and untied by sleds.
    I remember the millions who left the earth;
    it holds no trace of them
    as it holds of us, tracking through snow,
    so tame and defenseless
    even the air could kill us.
    â€” NANCY WILLARD

Angel in Summer: West Virginia
    Forgiveness is water over stone,
    twenty-one rocks till it is pure.
    In my husband’s home county
    a river falls past strip mines,
    over humpbacked boulders,
    then is clear enough for trout.
    I have eaten those rainbows,
    small bones removed,
    silver scales browned in butter,
    startled eyes popped out.
    Each time I ask forgiveness.
    We are not afraid of the mountains,
    riddled with rattlers.
    An angel guides us through the passes,
    along the switchbacks.
    He looks like my dead father-in-law,
    like a Viennese undertaker,
    round-faced, small mustache.
    He leaves no tracks.
    While we fish the pools
    he sits, melancholic on the shore;
    there is no joy of heaven on his face,
    his death too recent for absolution.
    He smiles once, sadly, at a strike.
    Each cast is a prayer.
    â€” JANE YOLEN

The Mission of the Puffball
    Unlike my brain, it was smooth
    and white as that dead foam
    they pack around porcelain
    shipped from far ports.
    Fat angel,
    pocked like a wiffleball;
    a racquet could send it