Poem for Monday: The Angels Go Away

by Fenella Johnson

They come in the restlessness of dawn

before the birds

when the world is a sleepy iris-

the sky chiselled with clouds,

borne through the sultry hips of the hills,

the Angels,

on a sweet souled Sunday,

diaphanous wings founded politely away in hand luggage.

Along the feline curves of the road,

they walk,

past the fields where flies in a haze of small fruits

bury themselves in the work of systematic consumption

of the bloodied blackberries,

to the cities that lay

like great open cellos by the gasping shore:

to glut themselves on wild berries and Mozart,

mushrooms that taste like sponges,

red velvet cake,porous lemon,

luminous baubles of grapes

-they spit out the seeds in pious circles,

red arid cocktails,

slyly the archaic dance of love.

Belly buttons

distant circular foreign

fascinate them:

up in their motel rooms

they wrap themselves around shower curtains

patterned with slender scales

as if they were the shredded skin of a mythical snake,

listen to the listless sighs of the seagulls outside

before they fall asleep.