[to my father, in memorium, Robert R. Douglas]
[4 october 1924 - 7 april 2002] and to The Arkansas Gazette
there's an angel for going out
when candle flame wavers
and one for coming in,
in a shifting of scarlet leaves;
dreaming, I was that song
in jeweled octobers, all along
all garnet to the very heart...
the one that puts violet creases
in the wind: then it is Spring
and the weights are lifted
the ones balancing grief with
joy.with
the justice of well made stories.
the broadsheets corrected.
we don't often speak in headlines
of the angels of the end;
of endings in gold leaf
and Sunday coloured comics
I want to think as if
in a blind snowstorm of thinking
through these too humid summers
the Pavillions at Petit Jean
favoring the angel of the cooling winds;
of the angel of returns, returning again
to first beginnings and the angels of light
in linotype scattered and snowy quiet.
like the names of Crosett,Kenset.Paragould..Magnolia,
Arkansas names like gold
we have lost certain angels, with roses bedight
gathering the children on rickety bridges;
under the red clay sun and by favorite creeks or
slipping out of our pockets at noon, on deadline;
at night the moon like a milky quartz
in city deserts, public squares and in the cypress gloom
of old paintings. there was a refuge I thought
or in a Proustian bar of exquisite music.
Macarthur park 'melting in the dark' and our
commentary then; who leaves cakes out in the rain
hold your horses,green icing??
here is the melody and the land I lived in then
the gardenias in the fluted vase
when we were at home the last summer,
amidst the emblematic mockingbird, the applebloom
the angel of stars and staircases descending
into the Unknown, the banishing one
of disenchantments disabused;the cowboys in old
movies, the cartoons...like Depression era glass
rainbowed, the angel near the throne
who suddenly called you:not by your newspaper name
one crystal bell resounding
among all the others.the railroad tracks, the small
towns made suddenly infinite as you are leaving
and on the waves,unedited,
painted, printed on the silk screen of skies
by cherished pines and the hidden fault lines,
the angel of the mariners
of the soldier-chroniclers of Time.
mary angela douglas 17 may 2018
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