Angel Fishing

Premise: The angel in question is fallen; sometime later our poet-

Philosopher ventures out, in search of song and meaning.

Listen.
I listen and I
learn, my love
Let your ears attend
like a child pretending
to you and to our
God unending
to the strife your ship
stirred up that you might
establish this beginning.
I gathered up love's gerunds and sailed
safe from language, for in parting with the dusty
spines of grammarians and linguists could I
more completely quench my desire
among silk sheets of song.
Resolute,
with warped oars you'd spooled out
many strokes across the sunlit surface of the sea
before a stray hook you'd casted snagged
my solitary wing and pulled my
frail body up to the open air

I'd grown comfortable down

there, nestled in my cold,
clay chrysalissilence
my sole contender.

You reeled me in believing

the muse had granted you
a moment of her time.
I laid a limp doll out along the deck
to relish and revel in its docile formskin
of fungus, melted animals, curls of salt.
My head secure in your hands
you shift the muscles in my throat,
thread twitching fingers through my veins
and in an impassioned series of queries and tweaks
you tune my voice like a transistor radio.

First, a dry croak as years of stasis work against you;

next, a low murmur; then, a high hum; finally,
a song. It is a sad song.
Also sweet.
It is also sweet, and as the heart
collapses from this sad sweetness
the dislocated word is made articulate:

[Orchestral interlude with ice, cocaine, and rainbows.]

Sonant strains flirting with unfocused ears,

you'll misspell symphonies as scratches
across staves in lampblack ink
that glistens with implication as it
eagerly awaits its twilight.

You'll learn to lovingly look onward as

a cadence inches off my lips and
onto paper through your pen;
but always you'll refuse to see
all symbols for sounds are silent.

What follows is more of the same:

a few years of fluency, then the long
silence, as quiet as I knew before you.
and these illicit interruptions
in the dark of summer
births the halcyon quiet I'll
labor through after you.
When I sang, "I am my world," that world
sang back as space inherent in identity.
Admitting this admits also the end
implicit in the actions you'd committed: for,
had you savored grace in an angled embrace,
your bounded body would've become
a sound subsumed by silence.

But youwho sought a song to sing

for love, and not for lifewill be
blessed with the love to live the life
that limns its loving's limits.
And yet, my love? And yet? You sing
for others, not for me, not for us . . .
Yesoh yessays I,
the praiser of my
master.