}} I Don’t Have Feelings for the Angel |

Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










I Don’t Have Feelings for the Angel

I’ve heard that phrase, The Angel
of History; have read of it in both
poetry and philosophy, accounts
of wars after which the dead

wind up entombed or buried in the soil,
their gravestones adorned with carved
cherubs or soot-stained angels somber
of face— Their heavy wings plume

downward, as if never to fly again.
The angel holds its hands aloft: as if
to anoint, as if to gesture at the utter
inaddressability of everything that’s

ever taken place, or been done
to you—which is why it’s easier
to still the lips into silence, easier
to stand through the years as if made

of stone, as if stone doesn’t crack
or break. Has the Angel seen what no one
will tell me, but that I’ve always wanted
so badly to know? Has it witnessed

how and where two bodies sowed
the seed into the soil of my becoming?
In every photograph, my father’s brow
is mine. But I can’t tell which parts

of mother’s younger sister’s face I can claim,
whether he took it in his hands, if he was gentle,
if he was rough; if he demanded some show of loyalty
that could not answer back except in surrender,

in the belief there was no other choice.
No one ever talks about such things;
but since history is even then what
happened, can the Angel be held

complicit? Is the Angel the sponsor who
looked on without stopping any of what it saw:
in a back room, in a bathroom stall, in the kitchen
when no one else was at home? I don’t have feelings

for the Angel. I do have feelings for the people
it turned into my kin; for the bonds it multiplied
in ways they also strained to wear through the years
they lived together: fiercely guarding secrets,

loving and hating and fighting in the same space.
They are who they are, in the end— their portraits
thumbnailed into every side story, their skin oils
part of every bit of furniture in which they rested

their bodies; their blurred reflections haunting me
from the bottom of every pot into which I’ll ever
cast my gaze. Love and Duty, Love and Hate, Honor,
History— I want to say Enough, but the Angel isn’t done

with whatever it thinks it wants to do. I want to say
Tell me everything exactly as it happened, tell me what
it means; but there are secrets they’ve taken
to the grave that even the Angel could not know.
 
 
 
← Luisa A Igloria