While reading Rilke on angels in my adolescence (originally published in Across The Margins, 10/27/2025)

While reading Rilke on angels in my adolescence

I thought of air and breath and exchange
and wrote a poem, since lost, in which human
exhalation became angels’ inhalation
and vice versa, a symmetrically
if not theologically, sound arrangement
 
they required our density and susceptibility
to gravity, without which they floated
aimlessly, hopelessly, a fate worse than Lucifer’s
who at least has a base of operations, a home,
while these others wandered like hobos hoping
to hop a celestial freight train, until they found us
 
and we were inspired by their lack of corporeal
reality, their ability to move freely through all
four dimensions without the restrictions of physics,
and thus we were impelled to leave the cave,
to stand upright and look to the stars and the moon,
to howl in frustration, to heave a lovelorn sigh
 
I wrote with youthful earnestness
of the angels among us who draw our eyes
and our thoughts upward and outward, inspire
us and drive us to find others in whom to invest
our energies and desires, upon whom to inflict
our fears and aggressions
 
I realized later there are no angels, Biblical nor
of the Hollywood variety, instead, and better, we
have artists, poets and singers of song who from the first
have been our guides through the mysteries, our lights
in the darkness, guardians of the only holy things:
breath and exchange