As I looked down from heaven,
I was saddened much to see
(from a place where I could no longer
affect the things that happen in the world)
she refused to take her six pills a day,
the god-given remedy for the kind of illness
no one likes to mention.
She would not take them ever,
in the morning, at noon, or at night.
I saw, looking down, trying to understand
the bare, pale sickness that wracked her mind,
that she would do only certain things –
count her fingers: one, two, three, four,
one, two, three, four,
lying in bed or upon a quiet night.
I guess she hoped that having such firm control
over her body would yield comfort in spades.
As I looked down from heaven,
how could I do anything else
but cry (if angels can)
to see how she engaged with men
she’d met sometimes on the streets of cities,
going back with them to their apartments –
they said that they were DJs,
and so cool – to spend the night
in full, or just to four a.m.
To see how little sleep she was apt to get,
writing furiously in notebooks,
for hours on end, never looking up,
in her room, her little apartment,
or up the streets and then down,
writing, writing, with every moment
growing more fearsome, more furious,
more deep into her own mind,
thinking thoughts of grandeur, of world renown:
that she was the next great Shakespeare;
that the great American novel
was going to come bounding out of her steady,
sprawling, scrambling scrawling on the page.
To see her living fantasies –
that she was a spy, a secret agent –
to see her slinking through the streets,
on a mission, canny, coy, putting together
the little sunken secrets, to craft
a view of life I can’t warn her from,
no, not anymore, and she just goes tumbling,
turning, every day falling deeper and deeper
into unrealities: my god – I think –
one day, she might really try to fly!
To see all this, and I can’t – I cannot –
there is no chance for loving interaction
between angels and the people they care for,
still plying their days on dusky earth.
No.
There is not.
But maybe – just maybe – I can in fact look down,
stir a little breath on the leaves of the trees
as she clambers through a park in town,
and with that wisp from loving heaven,
give some rest to her soul.
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