The Wishbone of an Angel

by Frances Ruhlen McConnel

Here lies the wishbone of an angel,

and here comes the politician, a bit of down stuck to his lip,
to snatch up, if he could, the left clavicle;
neck and neck with the CEO, who wipes grease
from his fingers so they won’t slip off the right clavicle,

tripping up the media mogul, who covets a 99% cut of the viewing
public when he sends his news team to film the mighty cracking,
so maybe the bureaucrat, who longs for more power, even if
only more of his greatest picayune power—to stand in the way—
can pick his teeth on a splinter;

while, coveting everlasting life, the biotech elbows his way through
the pot-bellied refugee kids on the crowd’s edges;

and, coming up fast, the leader of the gang (and who of us is not
a gang member?) dreams of how he will polish and pierce
and wear round his neck on a golden chain for all to envy,
to genuflect to, to hide their bared fangs, to hate with the fine hate
that starts wars; for this he would save the fallen, smoldering relic.

And, remember, one of us crows, the Uzi that tattooed the dot, dot,
dot through the path of the angel; yes, and the drops of blood
leading back to its splat, the pinfeathers wafting on our breaths,
the mighty flapping, the prodigious plucking, the delicate
knife strokes at the angel’s dissection.

And the lab—or was it a kitchen? The chemicals—or were they sauces?
The autoclave—or pressure cooker—that gave it this pearly sheen.

Oh, and the halo that flickered and circled and tipped over
in the field of a sky bloodied by this death, the bones
of extinct giants clattering over the glow of angel-bones, the roar
of God’s tsk-tsk and the tsunami of his shrug;

and the quakes, the great winds, the blasts, the charred earth
giving joy to the speculator, developer, builder,
ever willing to share in catastrophe’s riches;

and now, in a cloud of apocalyptic dust, the holy man arrives
on his own pilgrimage with his prayer of conversion of all
to the one ritual, the one divination of the holy city, the one
chord to the psalm, the one way to hold one’s pious mouth,
the one cloth to cover the one body part, the one
combination to open heaven’s gate, or its bank vault;

and, too far away, barely visible, the Inuit, who set out in his kayak
from a sea of ice rotting in the winter sun, dashing to drown
polar bear, walrus, seal pup, whose dreams are as big
as all outdoors, who knows as we know, someone will stomp
on his hand even as he reaches for the wishbone;

but hold on for the arrival of the banal and predictable poet
to practice her craft of shit-polishing, to make shitter
and shit-upon blush with sweet pride at their glory;

and, most splendid and appalling of all, consider the wish
of the lovers for the perfect egg of night at last
to seal them up from anyone else’s need, as,
stuck together with the juices of pink decay, they howl
more and much more and everything there is, a chorus

taken up and flung to the heavens by the tongues of the wealthy,
and spattered upon the middle class, who in their walnut brains,
their hazelnut hearts, are so sure it will come to them at last,
whatever it is—wealth, desire, fame—they ever so willingly,
humbly would bestow at the feet of the wealthy/the desired/
the famous, any claim to the wishbones of angels;

and what is left for the poor, the broken, the dispossessed,
whose wish has no word but only a whimper,
a cry coming in wave after wave of such want
it starts up a vibrating in this angel-bone tuning fork,

and in that humming, that psalm, the robes that are the flesh
on the bones of angels unfurl and feathers leaf out again
and light circles back and crowns the resplendent head
of the angel, who could lift again—could it not?—to become
again heavenly wish made in our own fallen image.