fallen angel heads: the archive

SHARON AUBERLE

ABBEY'S SOUL

"Disappear, from everyone, myself included,
down in the grandest canyons of the soul."
- Edward Abbey, Earth Apples

Once I thought the soul was a small thing,
a namecard, maybe, pinned inside, saying if
I was hell or heaven bound, the tiny,
two ounce weight (I read) that leaves the body
at death and can be accounted for
no other way. But now, Abbey's poetry in hand,
words leap from his book--thundering words,
like tonight's storm, sweeping aspen leaves before it
as Abbey's words sweep away my old notions of soul.
Words that sing like that great bull elk
in lightning-lit trees behind my house,
the grandest canyons of the soul!

Now I feel this once-tiny soul, this wild
stormy soul growing immense, rising up,
singing like wapiti, the elk, making up for all those years
so tightly packed into two ounces. Hell? Or Heaven bound?
HELL, IT DOESN'T MATTER Abbey would probably roar.
Just live it all now--the thunder and lightning of your life,
the poetry, elk, aspen and rain. Then disappear one day,
become like him--a pulsing of air in sweet canyon light


GRACELAND

"I've a reason to believe we all will be
received in Graceland." - Paul Simon

Sara, have you forgiven yet
that lean-faced man of the fifties
with his short, harsh hair and those
nicotine-stained fingers?

Does he still come to you
on windless nights, in dreams
full of hanging smoke and ask you why
his Hail Marys full of grace brought him none?

Sometimes, you say, you hear his ghost
crunching through those shattered
bottles where he found his grace,
while all you could do was pray, Sara,
and listen to Elvis-songs
drowning out those whiskey words,

till you escaped one day to a soft-haired man
of the sixties whose grace would implode
in those same bottles and then you began
praying to Elvis and a hot summer moon
riding over the lake, glittering in the glass
you held, and I watched while you dreamed
and sang Love Me Tender and made excuses
for your life.

I never saw you cry, Sara, not once,
you laughed instead, saying you dreamed
of rivers--lazy, warm rivers carrying the debris
of your life away, bearing you to a new home
where grace lived and then you left us
on a night when that hot yellow moon crashed
in the lake, to rise again on the Mississippi,
that old, slow river flowing into Graceland...
Sara, does Elvis still sing you to sleep on nights
when you can't help remembering a lean-faced man
with nicotine-stained fingers and what he did to you?