An Angel by Anne Stevenson
PN Review 134, July - August 2000
An Angel
After a long drive west into Wales,
as I lay on my bed, waiting
for my mind to seep back through my body,
I watched two gothic panels draw apart.
Between them loomed an angel,
tall as a caryatid, wingless,
draped like Michaelangelo's sibyl.
Never have I felt so profoundly looked into.
She was bracing on her hip an immense book
that at first I took for a bible. Then
prickling consciousness seemed to apprehend
The Recording Angel.
The pen she wielded writhed like a caduceus,
and on the book
ECCE LIBER MORI had been branded.
This book she held out towards me,
arm-muscles tensing, but even as I reached
I knew it was too heavy to hold.
Its gravity she made me feel would crush me,
a black hole of infinitely compressed time.
Each page weighed as much as the world.
Drawing my attention to a flaw in the book's crust -
a glazed porthole, a lens of alizarin -
she focused it (it must have been a microscope)
and silently motioned me to look.
Fire folding fire was all I saw. Then the red glass
cleared and a blizzard of swimming cells
swept underneath it, lashing their whip like tails,
clashing, fusing, consuming each other greedily,
fountaining into polyps and underwater flowers.
Soon - fast-forward - forests were shooting up.
Seasons tamed lagoons of bubbling mud
where, hatching from the scum, animalcula
crawled, swarmed, multiplied, disbanded,
swarmed again, raised cities out of dust,
destroyed them, died. I turned to the angel,
'Save these species,' I cried.
And brought my face right down on her book,
my cheek on the lens like a lid.
Instantly I knew I had put out a light
that had never been generated by a book.
That vision-furnace, that blink into genesis?
Nothing but a passing reflection of the angel.
Rising, for the first time afraid,
I confronted her immortality
circling like a bracelet of phosphorous
just outside the windscreen of the car.
For it seems I was still driving.
Solidity and substance disappeared.
A noose of frenzied, shimmering electrons,
motes of an approaching migraine,
closed around me.
And through that fluorescent manacle,
the road flowed on through Wales.
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This poem by Anne Stevenson is taken from PN Review 134, July - August 2000. Further contributions from Stevenson, including the rest of her poems in this issue, are available in the archive to paying subscribers, as well as more poetry, features, reviews and reports from across the back catalogue.