Water at Night

Not that I understand things. Angels don’t walk toward the ship, old engraving where moon throws a river of light, how angels would walk the ocean if they wanted to walk. They don’t. They hover. A lot of space between them and what shines like waves. Which can’t be a choice, for angels or the engraver who was in fact Gustave Doré after sleeping off the ancient mariner Coleridge left behind under guilt and regret and an albatross’s weight. Which isn’t much, but they are big animals, four feet across counting the wind involved and rain. Doré waking to a room not really of wings. I guess a stirring, something in the black expanse he hoped to razor into the copper plate — no, a graver, not a razor at all. Beauty does terrify, a bare nothing but stop. As in angels. Abrupt. Still, to cut them their flight on metal takes a while. His hands stiff, Doré under a deadline no doubt like the small endlessly later rest of us do what we do and do until it’s not what we do. Nevertheless, angels. Why did they keep coming, one by one radiant dark of a mind paused to this most desolate given: water at night. That it floods a future not even in the picture.