Old Poem: Angel (of the City)

This poem was published in xib #6 (1994), a small-press magazine out of San Diego.  I don't believe it is still being published.  This was a long, long time ago, but I believe I sent in a few poems to another zine and they declined them with a nice note suggesting I try xib.  So I did.  This angel poem was the first of an eventual series that I wrote from roughly 1992-95 (during my time in Newark, NJ and then Toronto).

The best of them got incorporated into a series called "A Rage of Angels." There was the Angel of Sand, the Angel of Caravans, the Angel of Running Shoes (eventually cut) and the Angel of Lizards (reassigned as the Angel of Snakes).  It was a bit of an ironic comment on how Catholic theologians in the distant past had assigned saints to everything, and how popular religion still more or less does this -- you might pray to your guardian angel for anything ranging from keeping your children safe to getting a kitten out of a tree or even that you still have $10 for gas in the change jar.  Obviously, I was being a bit ridiculous and seeing just how far I could take the concept (the Angel of Porcelain), though I suppose I wasn't entirely averse to marketing the series as angel-related, given how popular angels were in the mid 90s.  I'll probably put most of the rest in the series up on the blog over the next week or so.

One thing that is somewhat interesting (to me) is that I expanded the poem by roughly 50% into "The Angel of the City" (which I had hoped would be published in an anthology of poems about the subway).  Despite a line or two that still work (for me), the overall poem is kind of saggy and overstays its welcome.  The original version in xib (below) is stronger, though I suppose I could create a hybrid version much closer to the xib version.  If the world ever called out for such a thing ...

P.S. I realize that there are indeed 9 Muses, but I figured only 3 were on speaking terms with me at that time: Calliope (epic poetry), Euterpe (lyric poetry) and Erato (love/erotic poetry).