7
But Gabriel's blood foams in his chest
He cannot bring himself to look.
The remnant of the bowl of reeling,
Stairways, the legendary well,
Back alleys, low doorways,
Even the starry regions overhead—
All are gravel, destined
To be recounted only in
The hidden alphabets,
In the metaphysical schools,
In other histories of other worlds;
But for now he turns away.

To the woman
Who kneels before him
As if the light hurt, streaming
Into the broken room, who kneels
Like a marble subject begging
For her child's life in the reign
Of Augustus. He wavers
As if a gulf had opened up beneath him
In the dusty floor;
He is silent, as if in honor of one
About to die in a Roman war;
He wavers in the air
Above the place where he had stood,
Then he becomes
One of the pictures of holy streams
That flow in Joseph's hoard of wood.

8
Mary lifts her face from the deep
Shadows burying the floor, as if Azrael*
With his shovel suddenly
Had knocked the ceiling in, and says
Then open our empty tombs as well
On each of us.

           Gjertrud Schnackenberg
           Crux of Radiance, 1992