the poison dart of my personal angel of death

from Albert Goldbarth, "How I Want to Go," in Combinations of the Universe (2003)

1.
One way would be
almost without transition: water,
rising out of water,
as water, isn't aware of the moment
(well, there isn't "a" moment) it turns
to air.
          But a letter from Rich, which came today
from brambled Scottish highland, says
that the hawk can sense exactly where
the rabbit's heart is beating--is an aerothermal
system of pinpoint location--
"then it stamps its talon into the heart,
as easily as an olive is speared."
So that would be another way:
the poison dart of my personal angel
of death come down to lift me.

. . .
3.
EMO! [eey-mo]: what, one year, the "cool guys"
(jerks) in junior high kept yelling in the hallways
and covertly inking over the walls: acronymically,
Eat Me Out. It made no sense to me. First,
wasn't this command what the woman would say, not the man?
Was this supposed to be some witticism put forth
ventriloquially? And second, cunnilingus was desirable,
a pleasure--yes? Then why did this utterance
enter the world as if it were an insult? That year,
everything was confusing.
                                            For example, my Aunt Regina
was dying, making her departure
an ordeal of miscued neural paths
and failed speech, as measured in extra millimeters
per day of unstoppable, hardening cells. The cancer,
one of the doctors shrugged and said, was eating out her brain.

rilke's angels

from Rainer Maria Rilke, "The First Elegy" in Duino Elegies (1923)

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.
. . .
Oh, and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space
gnaws at our faces. Whom would it not remain for--that longed-after
mildly disillusioning presence, by which the solitary heart
so painfully meets. Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
Don't you know yet? Fling the emptiness out of your arms
into the spaces we breath; perhaps the birds
will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

from Robert Hass, "Looking for Rilke," in Twentieth Century Pleasures

The angels embody the sense of absence which had been at the center of Rilke's willed and difficult life. They are absolute fulfillment. Or rather, absolute fulfillment if it existed, without any diminishment of intensity, completely outside of us. You feel a sunset open up an emptiness inside you which keeps growing and growing and you want to hold onto that feeling forever; only you want it to be a feeling of power, of completeness, of repose: that is the longing for the angel. You feel a passion for someone so intense that the memory of their smell makes you dizzy and you would gladly through yourself down the well of that other person, if the long hurtle in the darkness would then be perfect inside you: that is the same longing. The angel is desire, if it were not desire, if it were pure being. Lived close to long enough, it turns every experience into desolation, because beauty is not what we want at those moments, death is what we want, an end to limit, and end to time.