Llewellyn McKernan  Daytona Beach     (Ellen Nielsen)
An Unknown Angel     

spikes the dice to even the odds, changes the face
of the woodland fog, dictates the shape of absence,
 the shadow at noon, if there were one.

 She’s the seven white waves that give way to the
sea, the speed that breaks the sound barrier, the
muscles that flex the chaos of your dreams, your

face most like hers when you turn the lonely crowd
of your past into a present your mother unwraps
 for Christmas.  Her wings bloom from one nudge,

 a thousand red feathers filling earth and sky with a
bright language, one written in air, on leaf, between
every grain the earthworm turns, but most of all

in what you grasp when you stumble and fall,
slipping down the steps of a fault into the dark of
 the underworld: here angel-shine shrinks to one

 glowing thread you pull through the needle of
desire, sewing up the cold, wet, richly torqued
inscrutable depths.  You grow light, inscribing

on black walls with invisible chalk the meaning
of your life.  Turning three times—once for faith,
 once for hope, once for love itself—you walk in

 your own shoes as you climb back up through a
stone crevice, your breath a bellow pumping the
red-hot valves of your heart, its alphabet of blood.