After Robert Hass

is all wrong:
one wing outweighs the other.
You wouldn’t believe the handicaps,
the slipped disks, bad hips,
leans and limps,
one wing dragging
like a gun through mud.

Angels in rows crane their necks
to handle the weight.
They watch us move below.
Angels were never human
so they don’t understand
when a man speaks to a woman
and the woman looks away
because she is thinking in this life
there are so many things we don’t forgive
and when you grow tired
of the ways I entertain myself (you
are one of them) you will tire of me.

When angels see a wish for something,
someone’s eyes squeeze shut, bodies strain —
they hate it. Our hope,
our belief in flight,
in the promise of angels, or prayer,
we break their hearts.
And the angels, weighed down,
cannot lift their heavy heads to look away.