‘THE ANGEL IN disguise at your table may ineptly face-paint your wee ones,
whose tears will mend holes in hand-me-downs.’
When the pharaoh in a jealous rage launched his genocide, the angel
who descended from Adam and from heaven led an army against him,
streaming like light from the sun in splendour. Though he’d dreamed of
desert nights warmed by angel down, soon he was praying for mercy.
Now his palace bears a sign: ‘Beware: militant angels guard this property.’
1st – The Angel Explained
They roar like a lion or whisper like a lover. All the wings do is betoken
arrival from elsewhere. Rainbow scaling is a studio trademark. The body
weight-to-wing length ratio is wrong for gravity. You protest: the bones
are the divine plan, the flesh a Platonic idea, the organs a sacred rite.
2nd – The Angel Community
Their pinhead proves the medieval intuition of relativity. Space-time
is a bowl, whose outside surface we inhabit. Inside, all our deeds are
dropped, for reuse, easily picked up. Are we all alone when all is said and
done? Impossible to be sure while we’re still so absorbed in dressmaking.
3rd – The Angel of Mortal Promise
There’s a spectrum of thought, from earth-green dragons to the quizzical
blue infinitudes. Allowed one wish, why not opt to become a bird-man
parking cars to raise cash for flying lessons, while studying on steamy
summer nights the quiet snowfall of small print, the pseudepigrapha?
4th – The Fallen Angels
‘Akimbo’ is the code name for the counterattack. There’s a thrill in
retribution, dropping them to an oubliette of the unimagined. You clutch
at tumbling pinions, the day-long plummet towards the floor of the abyss
where splattered serpents writhe. All possibilities remain unvanquished.
5th – The Angelic City
None has a taste for battle. Yet they see into the soul of the square mile, a
nanosecond’s trading edge, cruel fixes. Their war chest grows like wheat,
a nursery for swords. Courage versus corruption: a system flawlessly
working? Is bloodshed midge bites in the swamplands of Elysium?
6th – The Origami Angel
The paper engineer scoffs at your title: The Angel of the Vision Clinic.
Yet he too was taking pupillage unawares, celestial energies doubled with
every fold. This six-colour paper makes you think of Sainte-Chapelle.
Heraldic litter storms dazzle the infidel camped in a rock-strewn valley.
All six – The Angels on Duty
How can eternals be clothed? Only from history’s dressing-up box. The
imperial bodyguard scintillates, Byzantine in his pallium; the angelic
deacon gleams, stately in his cope and dalmatic. In a rush of swans’
feathers down swoops the scribe – quill dripping basilisk’s blood.
♦
Introduction to Six-Way Mirror | The Index of Hexagrams and Cantos
