Uncle Phil’s Flight After Death by Rebecca Kaiser Gibson


If in the company of two animal-faced angels,
his thin feet straight before, as written by Ezekiel,
his eyes flamboyant auroras, he’d bowed
always to the Shekhinah, downcast in the medieval
mind, where snails cure infection –
if having spoken holy holy holy over the echoic
decades, holy corridors reverberating, in the fretwork
worked metal intricacies of data, dates,
and details, he’d crouched in his bow and readiness to fly
with the two, the brothers, one on each side, winged
and furred, lifting him by his ever-bent elbows, and light
as dust to fly, his heels like a young goat’s, hitched
up, bent angle of a man –
he’d be empty now, his stories spun out on spindles,
a long tail over the hills.

 

Rebecca Kaiser Gibson has been published in Agni, Antigonish Review, Field, Greensboro Review, Harvard Review, Margie, Northwest Review, Pleiades and Slate.  She’s had residencies from the MacDowell Colony and The Heinrich Böll Cottage. Rebecca received a Fellowship in Poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and as a Fulbright scholar, taught in India. She teaches poetry at Tufts University.