Head, Perhaps of an Angel
- Head, Perhaps of an Angel
limestone, with traces of polychromy, c. 1250
Point Dume was the point,he said, but we never came close,no matter how far we walked the shale broken from California.
Someone’s gardenhad slipped, hanging itself by a vinefrom the cliffs of some new Babylon past Malibu.
Drowning the wordsthe wind didn’t fling back in our faces,the Pacific washed up a shell: around an alabastron
of salt water for the dead,seaweed rustled its papers, drying them out,until it died. Waves kept crashing into the heart
of each shellthat I held to my ear like a phone,but they were just the waves of my blood. And through it all
I heard him say,how could it be nine months agohis grandson had taken his own life, somewhere back east?
He was fifteen.O Pacific, what good is our grief?Something screamed at the sandy child who poured seawater [End Page 89]
into a hole.Child, you will never empty the ocean,Augustine said. How can I believe? The wet fist of a wave
dissolved in sand.Like a saint, a seagull flapped down the beachin search of something raw—an angel with an empty pail?
No, a teenage boy,hands as big as a man’s, held a sea slugquaking like an aspic. Under a rock, another one drew into its body
a sea creaturelarger than itself. Live, said Death,to child and childless alike, indifferently. I am coming.
[End Page 90]
Debora Greger is Poet-in-Residence at the Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida. By Herself, her most recent book of poems, was published by Penguin in 2012.
