The Hastily Assembled Angel Also Sustains the World
By Shane McCrae
The hastily assembled angel thinks
He must be more like God than people are
Especially because he like God can’t
Choose to be less like God he tilts his chair
Back his brown metal folding chair on its
Back legs and lifts first his right leg and then
His left onto the wolf-sized rock he’s using
As his desk while the great flood floods the plains
The valleys and the forests far below him
And the mountains eventually his mountain
Eventually his right leg on the rock
His left crossed over at the ankles Wanting
To be like God he thinks must be the wrong way
To be like God who doesn’t want to be
Like anything but I don’t want
To be like God he’d heard the rising sea
First in his sleep two nights ago he dreamed
A lion roared and couldn’t stop and wept
Roaring and in the dream the angel thought
I must record the lion’s roar and leapt
Down from his cot in the clouds to a small village
Built like a village near a forest from
Strong trunks and supple branches but it stood in
A desert and the roofs were thatched with bones
The angel saw no lion there but heard
Its roar and saw the roaring wind on the weeping
Sand and the weeping sand in the twisting wind
And woke on the mountain woke in falling snow like weeping
Sand not knowing how he had gotten there in snow and
Warm rain he woke and turned his face away
From the sun and saw instead the warm rain tearing
Snow from the mountainside he turned his face and saw
Already he was lost inside
God’s plan for the world again he hadn’t seen
In the millennia that must have led
To this moment the workings of the plan
He slapped the ground and stood he staggered to
His folding chair miraculously there
Folded and propped against the wolf-sized rock
And listened to the weeping and the roar-
ing world below him not life but the world
Itself thinking This isn’t like any oth-
er sound as the storm stripped comparison from the Earth
But the angel kept the wolf in the rock
