Because the Dead / Tri-Angels

Because the Dead
 
I was late for the funeral. The cathedral tilted, and once I started walking under its arch, it grew and became like a city
 
unto itself. People advanced through the large wooden doors, dressed in dark suits and skirts, traveling in pairs, like animals
 
disembarking from Noah’s ark. I also wore grey (with black pumps), and I knew it wouldn’t matter that I was late
 
for the funeral. Although I had never been here before, I knew I’d blown across the sea. (Maybe that’s why it took so long to get there. Maybe
 
that’s why I was late.) I knew I had to arrive, but it didn’t matter that I was late. Only that I appear.
I had the vantage point of an angel’s--peering
 
down from the gargoyles. It didn’t matter that I was late for the funeral because it was mine. All of us attending,
 
at some point, kneeling in the pews, genuflecting in the aisle, lying still in the casket. Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, it was like a litany
 
of the saints: Harvey, Irma, Jose, Lidia, and then Maria slaughtered Juan. No one survived. It didn’t matter that I was late for the funeral because the dead are still filing through.
 
 
 
*** 
 
 
Tri-Angles
 
The guy with the red
beard doesn’t believe
in angels. He goes out
of his way to announce this,
 
inserts it into the writers’ group
as casually as kneeling down
to tie a shoe. But he knows I am
the one who knows angels, I read
 
my poems about them the night
before the day of his proclamation.
He must be thinking of them literally
(the angels not the writers). He must

think that I think of them flying
in white robes and halos. He doesn’t think
about the angels formed from ashes and acid,
rancid trash and smack. The guy with the red
 
beard writes about drug culture and doesn’t
believe in angels as if no user ever hallucinated
before. The guy with the red beard has a voice 
that sounds like a tricycle wheels careening 

across cracks in the cement—as when a child
circles his three wheels over and over the same
fractures in the same O, like he’s riding around a cracked
circus ring, and the red beard’s cement voice thuds over
 
syllables like VERy and VEdas. This red-bearded
guy doesn’t believe in angels, but he’s interested
in depicting the ‘dark side of life’– you know, drug
culture, and such, because no angel ever drifts 

around low-down addiction – angels only
dance on clouds swathed in glorious beams of light. 
 
 © Kimberly Williams