Love's Last Number. Christopher Howell

       2. THE WRONG ANGELS

      1  Village

      2  Tin Soldiers

      3  I Said to God, “I’m Thinking of You”

      4  The Wrong Angels Edvard Munch A Tense Shift Addresses the Imagination Goodbye to All That I Thought War of the Worlds Saint Second Amendment In This Photograph Baron von Richthofen Meltdown The Angel of Mars: Two Views

      5  Scout’s Honor

      6  Reflection upon Psalm 121

      7  Anchors Aweigh Tag Religious Experience Limes Night Watch Lifeboat Dream If the Moon Kept Goats: A Veteran’s Tale

      8  The Situation

      9  Two Endings

       3. THE UNATTAINABLE NOW

      1  Two Birds

      2  The Limits of Mercy

      3  My Youth

      4  He Speaks to the Muse

      5  The Nothing That Is Ghosts Author, Author Your Brother’s Face A Man in the Park Masefield in Purgatory Second Message Abide with Me

      6  Is Time the Road or What Travels along It?

      7  A Willow Life

      8  Falling

      9  The Body at Rest

      10  Biography

      11  Take Me out to the Ball Game

      12  In the House of the Afterlife

      13  Memory’s Daybook

      14  Voice

      15  A Last Walk in the Quabbin

      16  Love’s Last Number

      17  Step by Step

      18  Wyoming

        ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

       1.

       THE AGNOSTIC PIROUETTES

       Do you know, Daphne, that song of the old days,

       At the foot of the sycamore or under the white laurels,

       Under the olive trees, the myrtle, or the trembling willows,

       That song of love that always begins again?

      —ROBERT DUNCAN

      A SHORT SONG

      This is a song of our consciousness, that faltering

      old man who will never make it across the bridge,

      who sits down in the grit and dust of it with his wrinkled sack

      of groceries that will have to last. A song of his foolish bravery

      and terror, his hope that will not stay focused, that wanders

      a springtime path between peach trees

      and the berries, humming something, forgetting,

      and humming again. A song of his wishes

      tossing their hats in the wind and watching the last boat

      depart, its cargo of nameless meaning casting flowers, waving

      out of sight as the sun goes down.

      It is a song of memory’s little ways and sudden corner-like loveliness

      turned to smoke and broken glass it eats and eats

      to stay marginally alive. A song of the bridge that never ends

      really, and never whispers this

      as the old man listens for the one spot of silence

      or the one clear voice that might be his.

      DESPERATELY COMPOSED

      I wake on a small raft

      and see her swimming away

      with a cat under each arm

      and wearing the sun

      like a kind of sombrero.

      Again I have not been chosen.

      What will I drink, so far from land?

      Where will I find flowers enough

      to keep me breathing what

      St. Francis called “the Perfect Air,”

      the pneuma of hope’s tiny bells

      announcing