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Gravity's Angels
(after Feynman)
To make us travel along closed curves, ellipses
as Kepler understood, angels were needed.
The tireless beat of their wings on space, of their angular feathers
pushes all worlds together.
So many angels, we mistake them for clouds
furring the planet's curvature,
its cone of shadow their wake as they press inward against sunlight.
Nothing desires to fall, to converge. It wants to keep going.
Angels lean us into our seats and shoes, tug our skins downward,
lead us toward the center of the earth, after so many years of falling
into scalding nickel-iron cores of each other-
God made the angels. The angels
assembled galaxies, then stars, then planets. All the while,
though, hidden inside the atom-hells, unpredictable demons worked
hunched over. Inside the twisted and splintered space
God left behind for them after the very start of things
they bind sullen-browed nuclei, frantic electrons
leaping away like souls toward connection.
Crushed wasplike in the cores of suns, tumbled through nebulae
demons are water's architects, and snow's; they sculpt the proteins; they
the nerve-gardeners, foresters in bone. And all the while
stars go through their graceful motions, the moon
falls faultlessly past the horizon every time. Angels
get all the credit.
God (with regret) made the demons. The demons make worlds
out of infinitesimal crisscross of force, flame-blur of probability.
He made the angels. The angels
push worlds together, making them drop
away from the straight lines they were traveling in,
into God's finely, dully differential loops.
Where they were trying to go and why, till the angels took over
not even God, the single true Circle, understands.
That unknowing is his only circumference. Sometimes
along that sensitive edge, He feels a straight line, wiphless and burning
coldly, to Him: like O of absolute zero uncurled into infinity's
I, tangent at every point to His arc, it's a highway
where a Traveler is always already passing, on the move
from before the beginning, to after the end-
Copyright 1999, Adam Cornford. All rights reserved.