We sit in a circle and hold hands. 
I'm restive. You mumble a curse—
then louder, I curse him—
though later, you'll take back 

the word. It's whatever. 
You've visualized harm 
to the warmonger—a hole, 
you say, in the middle 

of his forehead.  To wish him 
enlightenment, one of us quips. 
You know, she adds, he's had 
some work done. It's obvious 

around the eyes. He hasn't changed 
in 20 years. He's put on weight, 
I remark, or maybe it's botox. 
We talk as if a conversation 

could change things, our words, 
the vibrations of which fluster him 
with thousands of wingbeats 
of new consciousness. Elemental. 

We spit and spit, drawing round 
the chrysalis of sorrow where
we'll shapeshift so the beautiful 
furies might touch him.
                        

Pressing the place where the bone broke, 
the surgeon asks if I can feel that, meaning, 
whether I have tactile sensation.  Yes, I say,
meaning that while I can’t feel 
the sensation of his hand exerting
pressure on the arm that can’t move—

cannot hold a pen or a hand, fork
or a book—my body’s oddly moved 
to tears by facts and ads alike.  
S writes of militarization at the border 
70 miles away, of children alone in pens 
guarded by soldiers and I weep.  Numb 

to the difference, I’m also tearing up 
for the woman in a hijab alone on a bus 
in a TV ad.  I’m not alone and don’t seem 
to myself to be crying for me except, 
I suppose, of course, I am.  Silly to admit 
infirmity holding me back from what 

I should have written when I could 
but didn’t, be the change the magical 
thinking of active imagination 
which affirms things as they are.  
I’ve considered the phenomenology 
of pain, the cruel mystery of harm: 

Courage killed for writing in lands exalting 
cowardice to power. Pain is a path to empathy 
which the infirm body forgoes toward itself 
but follows for others, sense I’m too broken 
to make, the dream of many splendid rooms 
in a house: and here the little door to enter.

1

The angel sat on a pew among wedding guests 
in the cathedral the Americans had bombed, 

the cloister still a ruin. Blue light 
from the rose window prismed its features. 

2

It returned the gaze of the groom 
who did not recognize the angel 

visiting his wedding. Then the man 
was married and the angel vanished.  

3

After the car crash, when the engine 
crushed into the driver’s seat, 

and the man walked away unharmed,
he’d seen the angel again.  

4

Or, anyway, 
now he thought an angel stood 

at the edge of the gathering crowd 
who was a head taller than him, 

5

hair a silver nimbus, not the angel of Death, 
for he hadn’t died though struck he was 

from Whirlwind Time ticking metronomically 
toward a moment in which, detached,

6

he’d be free from all he hadn’t done, 
and all he had.