Trying to divine

Something sacred, what the long line

Played out and reeled in

Delivers silvery, wet and flopping

Ungodlike

But alive on a crescent of beach.

Of course they disguise themselves—

Fish with wings, weathervanes,

High-flying hawks—

Those “purely spiritual and

Splendid beings”

(This from an Islamic tract)

Who row and spin in their interceding,

The sum a practical account:

Crops grow,

Tumors fade, children

Remain whole, the thread doesn’t break.

Sublime, sublime

The evidence of angels.

For them, the bamboo

Unfurls its shade, long poles that

Sway and clack

Like socketed pinions in the shimmering air.

Otherwise—

Murmurs in the crown,

A sudden cooling like the advent of rain.

Imagine the air were water

Through which we move, we swimmers,

With our upright striding.

Water that we fold about us

For primordial warmth in bath or shower.

Or curtain of rain

Parting the lawn’s astonished children,

A body memory—jumping to wet to dry—

The same recall and fluted bone

That lets us float and spin above the dreamed landscape,

Carefree and fishy in the pearly light.

Just so, the stouthearted

Gaze into heaven’s darkness hoping for

Gravity’s rescission. Then

Plummet headfirst into that awesome Abyss.

There’s virtue in such scale,

Being the speck not the squall that

People still talk about: how it

Whipped into a storm that loomed miles over us,

We stargazers, we rocketeers,

Stunned by what we were taking in

And taken in by—dust up the hose,

A moment’s thrilling ride, then some other

Nothing at all.