I woke up real early to write about death (the lake through the trees) from
the angle of the angel. There's the kind of angel that when I say
Someone please push me out of the way
Of this bad poem like it was a bus.—well, it comes running &
tackles me and oh, it's divine football—Or
in the dream when the transparent buses 
came barreling towards us:—it was there. Half of all Americans say

they believe in angels. And why shouldn't they.
If someone swoops in to tell them how death's a fuzzy star that's
full of bugles, well it's a hell of a lot better
than what they see on TV: the surf much too warm for December, and rollercoasters
full of the wounded and the subconscious
that keep pulling in—Who wants to believe

death's just another life inside a box, tale-pale or more vivid?
Not me. Like in Gladiator, when they showed the cypresses
flanking the end-road—O set 
Your sandal, your tandem bike, into the land of shadows—of course
I cried. Show me a cypress and I'll just go off, but
I don't want that to be it. Or
some kind of poem you can never find your way out of! And sometimes

I think I nod at the true death: when from a moving train
I see a house in the morning sun
and it casts a shadow on the ground, an inquiry
and I think "Crisp inquiry"
& go on to work, perfumed of it—that's the kind of death
I'm talking about.

An angle of light. Believe in it. I believe in the light and disorder of the word
repeated until quote Meaning unquote leeches out of it. And that's
what I wanted to do with dame Death, for you:
repeat it until you're all, What? D-E-A-T-H? 'Cause Amy
that's all it is, a word, material in the way the lake through the trees
is material, that is: insofar, not at all.
Because we haven't yet swam in it. See what I mean?
I see death, I smell death, it moves the hair on my face but

I don't know where it blows from. And in its sources is my power.
I'm incredibly powerful in my ignorance. I'm incredible, like some kind of fuzzy star.
The nonsense of me is the nonsense of death, and
Oh look! Light through the trees on the lake:

the lake has the kind of calmness
my pupils' surface believes...and this is just the thing
that the boxed land of shades at the end of the remote
doesn't program for: the lake is so kind to me, Amy,
and I'll be so kind to you, Amy, and so we'll never die:
there'll be plenty of us around to 
keep casting our inquiry 
against the crisp light. Light is all like,
what's up, I'm here I'm an angel! & we're
all: no you're not, that doesn't exist. We all laugh and laugh...

Or cry and cry. The point is, it's words, and so's
death. Even in that silence
there's bird calls or meteors or something hurtling
through space: there's matter and light. I've seen it
through the theater of the trees and it was beautiful

It cut my eyes and I didn't even care

I already had the seeing taken care of. Even in the months I didn't have
a single poem in me, I had this death and this love, and how's
that not enough? I even have a quote:
Love is the angel

Which leads us into the shadow, di Prima.