Angelica Vaccaro
(prologue)
The sky is calling…
The sea is singing my name.
I am a twilight song.
A canopy of stars swing above me.
The moon is God’s eyes, and here we are at once,
(I touch the moon,
leaving my fingerprints on His eyelids.)
1.
In my childhood, I was a beekeeper.
An apiarist; the honey was mine, the fattened and imbued queen
shed her thorax and coddled me.
She with her pollen-drunk rages amid my starved mornings,
a maddened matriarch memorizing my mind, mid-sleep.
Infra, she rose only as high as she could,
outweighing her wickedness.
2.
I walked in time with a king – no, The King,
no!, The King of my World. The Art of Becoming (noble) outwitted me –
how could I ever shine the way he imagined an angel might shine?
Yes, daddy dear, did you hear my songs?
I was always so frightened to sing for you.
I was always so frightened.
3.
Time, with her threatening march and her rawboned hands,
took apart my Christed communions and I felt every fiber molder to the marble
beneath my patent and ivory soles, and shattering like the summer night – the thunder giving birth to a
lightning bolt.
Where had I gone? I was stolen, everything taken. Where had I gone?
How weary I wandered through the windstorm and the watershed.
4.
A seraph bestowed herself upon me. Her eyes sang like June sunflowers,
her body on its side – a stunning yet subtle Stradivarius.
But I weakened her strings from years of weaving my bow across her heart
and the heart and the heart. The music stopped,
everything (concave).
Absolute silence…
I let her go –
the most powerful regret, a never-ending drumbeat in my hollowed marrow.
5.
I was wrapped inflexibly in the grasp of a seething serpent.
He used me, lured me with his deluded and incandescent eyes,
but I was a spiral; I clung, I clung, I clung. He had a castle of diamonds and he
let me inhale them, one, by one, by one. I saw worlds and galaxies. I discovered universes this way.
The serpent took me to Lady Caïne and Lady Caïne took my life,
playing with me mindlessly, carelessly –
I was her obedient servant.
I was her experiment. She was my experiment.
I was her vessel pressurized by the weight of winter. I, the weight of winter.
But she brought me to Death’s faceless void and I became the Archangel Michael, destroying Satan,
and becoming the sky.
6.
Icarus. Did the sun burn? How closely and carelessly he flew,
he flew too high for too long and I was the sufferer. The caged bird did not sing.
I burned with him, forced into the great star, forced into
its heat and its violent storms. I couldn’t scream. My body burst, came apart –
the most violent of scenes: the blood and the brain matter, the asphyxiated lungs,
the bound appendages.
But I was a goddamn earthquake. I created light when there was only darkness.
I separated the earth from itself, and he from the earth, and myself from him.
My lifeless legs learned the power of lift off, my body outstretched, the wingspan of an eagle.
Airborne, just like I had always dreamed – soaring, following the North Star, connecting
the freedom in my heart to each particle and part of the galaxy I’ve always longed to revere.
I was celestial.
(epilogue)
I am celestial…
I am a million moments, thousands of dreams.
Millions and millions of metric tonnes of tenacity and valor.
And God, am I valiant.
Let me gaze into your eyes once more
(the moon, the moon,
my God, the moon).
***
Angelica Vaccaro is an emerging poet and essayist who lives and works in Metro Detroit, and has been writing for over two decades.