It is not because angels are holier than men or devils that makes them angels,
but because they do not expect holiness from one another, but from God only.¹

With a smile fixed in his eyes²
he said he was looking for a path
labeled
“accept this.”³

I studied that smile;
questioned without speaking.

He spoke then, saying she’d said
“Perhaps catastrophe is the natural human environment,
and even though we spend a good deal of energy
trying to get away from it,
we are programmed for survival amid catastrophe.”&sup4;

Sad smile
turns away;
watches clouds drift,
mountains sit
stripped naked
before internal natives.&sup5;

I’d heard her say one time:
“The poet must be free to love or hate
as the spirit moves him, free to change,
free to be a chameleon, free to be an enfant terrible.
He must above all never worry about his effect on other people.
Power requires that one do just that all the time.
Power requires that the inner person never be unmasked.
No, we poets have to go naked. And since this is so,
it is better that we stay private people;
a naked public person
would be rather ridiculous, what?”&sup6;

And such she was,
I knew,
reading what naked internal natives
smiled and chattered over as she wrote.
But now, before the world,
they smile
and shine
only through the eyes.