Fragment of An Angel

By Linda Mills Woolsey Three Postcards from the Cloisters, Fort Tryon Park I As I study gray folds of your stone sleeve I wonder how the curious scholar guessed your humbled form angelic. Was it your face—unmoved beneath the blow that slashed your marble cheek? Only the fallen are scarred like this. At least that's what books say shaping Paradise as a dream of permanence. Perhaps some hint of vanished wings betrayed you. But your marred shoulder might just as well have borne a burden. Your wreck is hard to read as yesterday's words. Still, you persist, riddling evangel. And still refuse to meet the tourist gaze that gropes for souvenirs of shattered certainties. II Only a splinter of a host, still you keep your wingless watch over the Lady throned in Langdon Chapel. Her honest wooden face looks out, uneasy at this staring crowd who bear no gifts. Her golden shoulders hunch to shield the headless Child regal and stiff in her gracious lap. The hands that maimed Him fell to dust. So, too, the hands that saved these fragments of God's house, hiding saints and angels in the churchyard earth beside the sleeping dead. So many ruins, who can count? Granite grows smooth and blackens at the touch of living hands. Carved birch and alabaster alike bear wounds of doctrine and desire. Your gaze discloses nothing, judges none. III Now in Cuxa Cloister's garth the pears blush bronze, unblemished in exacting light. Their dense perfection curves like paradise, complete as contemplation. Even here, time glides through every cell— these pears will bruise and burst with ripening. Stone, wood, fruit—all whisper alchemies of grace that must dissolve to mend. Within the solid space they sing the stones themselves are fragile. ~~~~~ Next: Temporalia