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Among Angels
Poems
Nancy Willard and Jane Yolen
For Frederick and Claske Franck—N. W.
To David Stemple, Angel of Archives—J. Y.
For Michael—S. S. G.
Contents
Publisher’s Note
Prayer N. W.
Pistis Sophia: A Dispatch J. Y.
Angel among the Herbs N. W.
An Angel Considers the Naming of Meat N. W.
Every Visible Thing J. Y.
Angels in Winter N. W.
Angel in Summer: West Virginia J. Y.
The Mission of the Puffball N. W.
Names J. Y.
A Carol for the Shepherds N. W.
An Angel Tells the Birds to Gather for the Great Supper of God N. W.
Dancing with Angels J. Y.
Aunt Fanny J. Y.
Harpo and the Angel N. W.
An Inconvenience of Wings N. W.
Angels Fly J. Y.
The Winged Ones N. W.
Metamorph J. Y.
Angel Feather J. Y.
Angel in a Window N. W.
Lucifer J. Y.
Easter Sermon J. Y.
Harahel Writes on the Head of a Pin J. Y.
Gabriel Returns from the Annunciation N. W.
Angelic Script J. Y.
The Founding of Saint Andrews J. Y.
The Lesson on Guardian Angels at Star of the Sea Elementary N. W.
The Twenty-eight Angels Ruling in the Twenty-eight Mansions of the Moon J. Y.
Angels among the Servants N. W.
Photographing Angels N. W.
Jacob Boehme and the Angel I N. W.
Visitation in a Pewter Dish II N. W.
Jacob and the Angel J. Y.
Rabbi Loew and the Angel of Death J. Y.
Tobias and the Fish N. W.
The Archangel Michael Delivers a Sermon to the Stars J. Y.
About the Authors
Publisher’s Note
Long before they were ever written down, poems were organized in lines. Since the invention of the printing press, readers have become increasingly conscious of looking at poems, rather than hearing them, but the function of the poetic line remains primarily sonic. Whether a poem is written in meter or in free verse, the lines introduce some kind of pattern into the ongoing syntax of the poem’s sentences; the lines make us experience those sentences differently. Reading a prose poem, we feel the strategic absence of line.
But precisely because we’ve become so used to looking at poems, the function of line can be hard to describe. As James Longenbach writes in The Art of the Poetic Line, “Line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem, especially the syntax of the poem’s sentences. It is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be described generally or schematically. It cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe. Nor can its function be understood merely from its visual appearance on the page.” Printed books altered our relationship to poetry by allowing us to see the lines more readily. What new challenges do electronic reading devices pose?
In a printed book, the width of the page and the size of the type are fixed. Usually, because the page is wide enough and the type small enough, a line of poetry fits comfortably on the page: What you see is what you’re supposed to hear as a unit of sound. Sometimes, however, a long line may exceed the width of the page; the line continues, indented just below the beginning of the line. Readers of printed books have become accustomed to this convention, even if it may on some occasions seem ambiguous—particularly when some of the lines of a poem are already indented from the left-hand margin of the page.
But unlike a printed book, which is stable, an ebook is a shape-shifter. Electronic type may be reflowed across a galaxy of applications and interfaces, across a variety of screens, from phone to tablet to computer. And because the reader of an ebook is empowered to change the size of the type, a poem’s original lineation may seem to be altered in many different ways. As the size of the type increases, the likelihood of any given line running over increases.
Our typesetting standard for poetry is designed to register that when a line of poetry exceeds the width of the screen, the resulting run-over line should be indented, as it might be in a printed book. Take a look at John Ashbery’s “Disclaimer” as it appears in two different type sizes.
Each of these versions of the poem has the same number of lines: the number that Ashbery intended. But if you look at the second, third, and fifth lines of the second stanza in the right-hand version of “Disclaimer,” you’ll see the automatic indent; in the fifth line, for instance, the word ahead drops down and is indented. The automatic indent not only makes poems easier to read electronically; it also helps to retain the rhythmic shape of the line—the unit of sound—as the poet intended it. And to preserve the integrity of the line, words are never broken or hyphenated when the line must run over. Reading “Disclaimer” on the screen, you can be sure that the phrase “you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn ahead” is a complete line, while the phrase “you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn” is not.
Open Road has adopted an electronic typesetting standard for poetry that ensures the clearest possible marking of both line breaks and stanza breaks, while at the same time handling the built-in function for resizing and reflowing text that all ereading devices possess. The first step is the appropriate semantic markup of the text, in which the formal elements distinguishing a poem, including lines, stanzas, and degrees of indentation, are tagged. Next, a style sheet that reads these tags must be designed, so that the formal elements of the poems are always displayed consistently. For instance, the style sheet reads the tags marking lines that the author himself has indented; should that indented line exceed the character capacity of a screen, the run-over part of the line will be indented further, and all such runovers will look the same. This combination of appropriate coding choices and style sheets makes it easy to display poems with complex indentations, no matter if the lines are metered or free, end-stopped or enjambed.
Ultimately, there may be no way to account for every single variation in the way in which the lines of a poem are disposed visually on an electronic reading device, just as rare variations may challenge the conventions of the printed page, but with rigorous quality assessment and scrupulous proofreading, nearly every poem can be set electronically in accordance with its author’s intention. And in some regards, electronic typesetting increases our capacity to transcribe a poem accurately: In a printed book, there may be no way to distinguish a stanza break from a page break, but with an ereader, one has only to resize the text in question to discover if a break at the bottom of a page is intentional or accidental.
Our goal in bringing out poetry in fully reflowable digital editions is to honor the sanctity of line and stanza as meticulously as possible—to allow readers to feel assured that the way the lines appear on the screen is an accurate embodiment of the way the author wants the lines to sound. Ever since poems began to be written down, the manner in which they ought to be written down has seemed equivocal; ambiguities have always resulted. By taking advantage of the technologies available in our time, our goal is to deliver the most satisfying reading experience possible.
Prayer
Angel of lost spectacles
and hens’ teeth,
angel of snow’s breath
and the insomnia
of cats, angel
of snapshots fading
to infinity,
don’t drop me—
shoeless,
wingless.
Defender of burrows,
carry me—
carry me
in your pocket of light.
—NANCY WILLARD
Pistis Sophia: A Dispatch
She took the twisting serpent in hand,
its tail twined around her arm;
along the trails of sky.
The garden was still except for the two
down by the river, naming the reeds.
She dropped the serpent by the apple tree,
then, following celestial orders,
flew back across the infinite blue.
Reports of strife on the back streets
and strikes by cherubim
occupied her long past the Fall.
In the Spring—she heard—
the two were served a sharp, swift eviction.
By then all Heaven was in an uproar,
so what did the Earth matter?
—JANE YOLEN
The garden was still except for the two/down by the river, naming the reeds.
—Jane Yolen
Angel among the Herbs
Angelica archangelica,
herb of the archangel Michael
on whose feast day you bloom,
you are not beautiful.
It is said that a monk
fell asleep and saw you,
tall, gawky,
singular as celery,
peering over the rose’s shoulder,
the lily’s cradle,
and woke singing
your praises.
You strengthen the heart,
unbind the lungs,
untrouble the stomach,
blow out bad spirits.
Let the juice of angelica
fall on deaf ears.
They will hear
the heartbeats of angels
and the dead coming back
in your roots
calling our names
in your green tongue.
—NANCY WILLARD
An Angel Considers the Naming of Meat
Whatever this was, with its arms and skirt,
crowned and winged and all-seeing,
it was no mere grazer. Crown roast,
butterfly chop, arm pot roast, skirt steak,
eye round. And what’s left
is large and curious as a fallen tree,
split open, a breached tomb of roseate marble.
Seven ribs stand up in a sea of fat.
Like rowers they lean into the wind.
Once they rocked as one, in out, in out,
pushed by the breath of the 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.
“You’re my first customer. This one’s on me.”
—NANCY WILLARD
Every visible thing in this world is put under the charge of an angel.
—St. Augustine
Every Visible Thing
Asparagus I can believe,
in its first green thrust;
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?
—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.
—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,
He smiles once, sadly, at a strike.
Each cast is a prayer.
—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 spinning
into the trees,
but I did not harm it
because I never met
a guest so content
as that sly loaf rising
under the dark leaves
of the hosta,
ripening like cheese,
drawing from darkness
the alien moon of its flesh.
Ferns packing up for the winter
willingly left their shadows
with an angel sent to bare
God’s inscrutable light:
in the name of the snow
and my white bowl of darkness,
do as the air tells you.
—NANCY WILLARD
Names
The cherubs at the manger
have no names.
Anonymous,
they hang from the rafters,
singing out only
God’s own.
I will call this one
Hosannah,
and that one
Hark,
and the little one
by the window,
wings ruffling
in the winter wind,
I shall call
Collie,
for, like a dog
rounding up sheep,
it was he chevied
poor shepherds on the hill,
driving them down
through narrowing streets
into the waiting fold.
—JANE YOLEN
A Carol for the Shepherds
An angel woke three shepherds
with timbrel, harp, and drum.
“The morning stars are singing,
the planets dance and hum.
So take yourselves to Bethlehem.
The Prince of Peace has come.”
The sheep scattered behind them.
The crags were dark and wide.
“The wolves will surely find them.
We will not leave their side
for all the babes in Bethlehem,”
the frightened shepherds cried.
The angel sang, “O Morning Bright”
and from his sleeve let fall
a hundred stars, and by their light
the frightened shepherds saw
the wolf that watched their flocks by night
was caring for them all.
“Tonight the rivers sing for joy,
the very stones have tongues,