The day after the accident

everything seems fragile. I can imagine

the insides of all kinds of things,

disruption of every surface —

the way the car’s steel blue shell

peeled away in places, cracked, the tremor

of bumpers, of my hands now on the wheel.

It’s true that everything slows

and spins.

                    I don’t believe

in angels, but if I did, they’d be

crawling underneath the skin,

then at the moment of crash

and skid — the split, unsheathe,

release.

                 Today I see

the bones of things, the reveal,

how everything is peeled,

fragmented, freed. If there were

angels they would not fall

but slip along the sharp,

limned edges of us all,

the slimmest crescent moon

descending in the sunset west,

lost now in metallic

blue and orange clouds. There is

no falling here,

                             only this quick

spin into the curb and the still,

sheathed moment of recognition,

then emergence. Then a world

where I don’t trust the surfaces.

Then the echo, the rattle of metal,

the absence of angels. Then

the quick, the split,

the skin of things.

Anne Haines (IN)  is a staff member of the Indiana University Libraries. Her work recently appeared in Blackbird, Calyx, Cortland Review, and Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology (University of Illinois Press, 2004). She is the recipient of an Honorable Mention award in the Thomas Merton Foundation’s “Poetry of the Sacred” contest.