Becoming Involved reminds me of everything...~ somewhere a man and a woman are making love up above the angels my love this morning as much as you-="you could not" angels hass:
Many are making love. Up above, the angelsin the unshaken ether and crystal of human longingare braiding one another's hair, which is strawberry blondand the texture of cold rivers. They glancedown from time to time at the awkward ecstasy--it must look to them like featherless birdssplashing in the spring puddle of a bed--and then one woman, she is about to come,peels back the man's shut eyelids and says,look at me, and he does. Or is it the mantugging the curtain rope in that dark theater?Anyway, they do, they look at each other;two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweetlubricious glue, stare at each other,and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder patheticallylike lithographs of Victorian beggarswith perfect features and alabaster skin hawking ragsin the lewd alleys of the novel.All of creation in offended by this distress.It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,rising. menagerie menagerie -although it would mean this, this - amid the -. The lovers especially cannot bear it,it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so thatthey close their eyes again and hold each other, eachfeeling the mortal singularity of the bodythey have enchanted out of death for an hour or so,and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realizedthat you could not, as much as I love you,dear heart, cure my loneliness,wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure himthat she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.And the man is not hurt exactly,he understands that life has limits, that peopledie young, fail at love,fail of their ambitions. He runs beside her, he thinksof the sadness they have gasped and crooned their way out ofcoming, clutching each other with old, inventedforms of grace and clumsy gratitude, readyto be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merelycompanionable like the couples on the summer beachreading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexesto themselves, and to each other,and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.-Robert Hass
