Mysteries of Afternoon and Evening

Angel's Flight, Vol. 4.1 (1979)

Rachel Sherwood

The wind is fitful now:
soot piles in the corners
of new buildings,
gulls stumble out of place
in the ragged branches
to skim against a rise
of pond water.

The children watch, breathless 
with the birds.
They feel an emanation
from this shuddering place.

This winter evening
the sky cracks with cardinal color
and we sit in cooling wonder
like dwarfs at the Venetian court
must have done--
amazed at Tiepolo's sunshot ceilings;
like us, they were fickle,
aware of smaller inconstancy.
But the dazzle above, enclosing,
seems fit or made for this 
fragment of belief.

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