The Necessary Angel

2

So the girl who received a whipping with a birch cane

In the schoolroom in front of all the others there,

Who witnessed in the passing weeks the bruises

Turn yellow & rose, until her flesh resembled

The random patterns blooming on late peaches—

Peaches & Cream is what the others called her,

Taunting her—is now a woman who watches, dry-eyed,

Above the cramped kitchen sink of a house trailer,

The way the wind whips the weeds in a vacant lot,

The way it blows trash against the chain-link fence

Along the interstate. She is just watching it get darker,

The dark seeming to spill out of the dark, out of what

Is already dark. She moves her hips forward until

They touch the sink, withdraws them slowly, pushes them

Close again. Some enchanted fuckin’ evening, she says,

A moment or two later. She sticks her tongue out

At the dark. She begins chopping things up for a salad.

Buddy you got no idea how dark it is, the blood swears

Against the glass. She hears the light hissing above her

In the kitchen, & thinks she may well be the witch

They said she was. A power without a switch to turn

It on. The birch cane falling through the autumn light

Of the classroom, the switch that left her in the dark.

The switch that can’t explain her life, or why she’s poor

And white in all this dark. It’s 1952.

White Trash—that’s what all her neighbors call her.

White Trash—the sprawl of a wave on a rock is all

That’s left within the words when I say them slowly now.

She isn’t in them anymore. And whenever she appears

It’s 1952 & she is making dinner.

This is before the country enters history. This is before

The president is fast forwarded out of his own blood—

Lifted & dropped like a sheet of paper in the wind—

Into the front seat of the white limousine. Wide awake.

If you still the frame the president looks wide awake.

Like the woman in the kitchen of her trailer making

Salad, her script for Benzedrine refilled, the bottle of it

On the counter there. Wide awake in 1952,

And as the dark filled the field outside she’d masturbate

With a cucumber, then slice it up & serve it to

Her husband in his salad. She’d watch him douse it

In Thousand Island dressing & wash it down with bourbon

While she smoked—she wasn’t hungry—across from him

At the table. It was the moment of the day

She waited for, the wind hissing outside the trailer,

Her husband still in uniform. Then she would switch

The cigarette to her left hand, reach between her thighs

With her right, & slowly unfurl her index finger.

It stood right up to him in the wordless dark beneath

The table. Death & Resurrection & the dark we are.

3

And against the dark? The lobby’s polished brass,

The bright light of a hotel barber shop, & a music

In a chair, his mind on nothing. Beyond the window,

Is Hartford in a downpour & a fallen world where,

Every Tuesday afternoon for twelve years,

My hill witch does Wallace Stevens’s nails while he reads

The New York Times. Sometimes it’s Bergson or

Santayana, the book folded into the newspaper so it looks

As if he’s reading the paper, & sometimes it’s the paper,

And at least twice each time he visits Stevens

Finds himself staring at her breasts

That rise & fall to the quickened rhythm of her breath.

He feels her warm breath on his fingernails

As she polishes them. He watches her & he thinks

Of the clouds slowly changing shape in the night sky

Of Florida, & knows if he reaches out, & touches her,

Touches the swelling cotton fabric of her sweater,

He will begin the long fall that culminates

In a commonplace of wave sprawl & a coastline

Filling with service stations, taco stands, motels,

A screen door banging endlessly in the wind.

And Oh he wants to! The desire has less to do with her

Than with a wish to fall & keep falling silently.

Out of the world. All it requires is this slight gesture,

His index finger uncurling like a thought

Made flesh to taste the withering cold to come.

She could feel him watching her.

And said to herself, as she dusted his nails & blew

Hot little breaths on each one of them,

“So you wanna floor show with your manicure.”

The next time she undid a button on her blouse,

Stopped filing for a second, & looked into his eyes . . .

He couldn’t work for a week. He waited for a warm,

Overcast afternoon in March before he tried to touch her,

And waited for his body to open like a parachute.

She was buffing the pink fingernails

Of his right hand when he discovered that his left

Index finger would not move. He tried again, & found

He could not move any muscle. He stared

At the swimming print of the paper on his lap

And saw instead the wave sprawl on the rock

And the beach growing colder, emptier than

The sound it held. Then he was falling toward it

In the dark. “It’s all right, it’ll be all right,” he heard

A voice saying. It was like the voice of a mother

In the night, the calm in its wake a widening, spiraling

Calm, like the pattern in a carpet he remembered,

Like a voice from childhood whispering in his ear,

The calm voice of a woman in a quiet house,

A voice he knew, a voice he had always known.

It was embarrassing to wake & find it was

The voice of a woman whispering in his ear,

To find he’d fainted in the shop while she

Was giving him a manicure, & to find her touch

On his face was gentler than the remembered

Touch of his wife, or mother, or any other touch,

That it was like the night air of Florida, incorporeal,

The finally dissolving pattern of a final heaven.