Ralph Angel

Like Animals

To give birth to ourselves each day makes this death
an act of will, and stopping here to say goodbye is all too sadly telling.
The air is limned with secrets, and we are painted tenderly,
and awkward. A breeze stirs up our alibis, but
they can be rewritten, and later still the fact of our desire.
It's enough to kiss the surface, a twitch
distinguished from afar, the regions
of our sufferings mapped out upon a sleeve.
Enough that nothing's missing, that the chapters
line up perfectly, how once revealed we
never stop reacting, how we
become the only character, looking
upward, tying a shoe.

---

Ralph Angel's new book, Twice Removed, is available this month from Sarabande Books. He is the author of two previous collections: Neither World (1995 James Laughlin Award) and Anxious Latitudes. He is the Edith R. White Distinguished Professor at the University of Redlands, in California, and a member of the MFA in Writing faculty at Vermont College. contents | next