The Shove of It

Dispensing with choice – who needs choice

when the walls have all vanished? – the angels

rejoice. If that happened to you, you’d know 

it was true: you’re light when you don’t have to lie.

It’d be easy to fly. Stripped of explicative scenes –

a play knows a sweet new economy of means.

Beats Deuteronomy: no laws and no Moses with

all of their ponderous pauses. We’re angels, too –

though down because we couldn't keep up the ruse

of pretending we’re coolly beyond all compunction

to choose – evolved beyond even such titans

as Moses and other great minds of the Buddhists

or Christians or Muslims or Jews. But nothing

that thinks what we think could take flight. Heavy

with bodily premise – sex and the rest: to drink

and to eat and to fight and to think means to die:

that’s why we’re in this odd place – supplied

with our pushes, pulls, pleadings and pleases.

Left in the air, angels seem sociopathic: too free

of care. Averse to the flesh or in love with it, we’re

cursed and we’re blessed with the shove of it.

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