W O R D S

I find myself, this season, contemplating angels. I am awestruck and transfixed by angels on neighbors' lawns, angels in supermarkets, angels on my Christmas tree, angels flickering and flitting in the corner of my eye, as I walk between rooms. And so, I have been reading Rilke, who took angels for his muse and knew the experience of touching the numinous; of being unmade by it.

"Rilke wrote that walking the land around the castle at Duino, he believed he encountered an angel.... Throughout human history there are no shortage of tales of poets taking inspiration from angelic figures, and indeed the concept of the poetic "muse" has this derivation. But I'm not aware of another incident in the twentieth century in which an angel appeared and offered the opening lines of a poem-indeed, the first Duinese Elegy, what turns out to be generally recognized as one of the great poems of the century." ~ Scott Horton