Angelus

By Cynthia Zarin

One opens the book at random, opens the day,
reads the old architecture whose face runs
like a dog along the window while the sun plays
catch with itself, bounding from Sunday

to Sunday, speechless with desire.
What more could there be than this?
The beams of the cottage, the sheltering
bones of your hips, the great abbey

of the afternon that fills as we watch with sound
and the voices trail back to you from the apse,
from the nave, from the shell-shaped hollow
at the base of your throat that even as it says

what it wants, even as it wills it, holds back,
and a great threshing noise saws the air
as the new beams are hewn all over again as
they must be continually, and knowing this

our very words, making and undoing, are torn,
the color of blood. For why are you here before me
after all this time, time which was mine alone
but now, because we have brought each other

here, belongs to you? We talk to each other
as birds do under the eaves, like the swallows
who return and return, and each time find
everything changed, everything different.

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