The Angel of Strange Loops / Rumbles Me Awake
The angel of rumble me awake / rumble me awake had told me
I was just a strange loop, just a series of activations that can be
made more active in the future.
Does this mean the brain is just a programmable holograph made more vital
by the working hands of mystery?
By odd gestures of God?
By the pull and thrust of romantic love?
Does it mean the sunrise, shimmering off of the Atlantic, will still resemble
dandelion and orchid strips of bark
as I peel them off, one strip after another, and lay them over the sand?
Does it mean each kiss I offer to my wife and receive back from her will
loop me into a complete new set of synaptic wirings?
Does it suggest I’m an open-end canvas? A programmable code?
______
Something in me awakens every time I see where my body is alive
and where it isn’t yet.
Each snippet of another’s kiss – like my wife’s – makes me capable of
carrying her a little farther along the way.
We are each other’s suitcase, said the angel.
Every depth contains a multitude.
That’s Whitman, said the angel as we walked arm-in-arm past a
ruined wall
in South Carolina – this was years earlier
when I was a blind necessity attaching myself to matter
because I couldn’t order the strange world to suit what was so incontestable
me –
and the angel slipped its arm in mine; we knelt down
to where the sea flowed like a woman’s wet garment into a small eddy
forming and undressing itself in the sand;
and the angel sadly whispered to me, ah, well,
you shall be struck by the mouth
of the labyrinth, by the multitudes, by beauty,
you will be clothed in it / a costumed man /
and be penetrated by its tender armies and by a holographic design
that turns you into other people, into other sea shells,
into these small innocent turtles
creeping out of the rolling waves like armored souls
onto the beach.
~
You shall be spun awake by the multitudes.
And you shall be / undressed in it / awake.
______
Every sunset you experience will reach you where the free choice of the soul
falters, wavers, trembles, receives the gold
in the chalice and then lets it go –
the angel whispered to me.
~
Ah well / the angel murmured /
this is how you shall be created / it said.
And you will suffer from affliction until your mind knows
the conquest / of the beauty / of the world as it falls /
like so many lovely memories
and teenaged stars all over you /
and you will be rendered obedient to it
until you are the speed of light where a body truly is and isn’t / yet…
and you shall be made of mandolins and blue lights that explode / into love.
______
That’s just the good, because it is joy. And jubilation pervades melancholy
like stars / igniting / in deep space.
And you will be made into the images of the world and its thousands of hours
as they are laid in you . . .
just as the shore is inlaid – inescapably – by this itinerant light.
Just as the rays of dandelion sunset become walkable strips of beach sand.
Just as your face now resembles
your wife / her stars / looking into you / at dark.
Her eyes blinking your face into you.
______
A few children had rushed by us as the angel told me all this.
The light surrounding us was anonymous. It was a silence.
It was silver and gold at the same time. It was an obedient empathy.
A subversive voice without emotion.
Rumble us awake said the angels.
Rumble us awake / awake / awake.
Then you will know the water running the world / running you.
And then, far out – this was on the Atlantic –
I could see the strange loop of the waves
rumbling in me / in you / oh yes.
Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist, a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of eight books of poetry. His most recent books are: Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit (Blue Horse Press: 2020) and Mortal Lullabies (FutureCycle Press: 2018). He has a new book, Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance, forthcoming from Kelsay Books. Meisel has recent work in Concho River Review, I-70 Review, San Pedro River Review, The Wayfarer, and Rabid Oak.
