The Angel with the Rucksack
I used to believe in angels
the way we were taught to believe,
but my angel with a rucksack
seemed to arrive from nowhere,
like plates flying across a kitchen,
children learning to talk,
I had never met anything quite like her.
‘Are you going to New York?’
she asked in the dusking rain,
and her wings were transluscent,
her eyes wider than the grand canyon,
leaving me nowhere to hide,
no time for saying ‘No way,’
before she hopped in and took me away.
I believe Frank Lloyd Wright
experienced something similar,
in fact all artists experience something similar
if they have the authentic gift,
the grit and the grind of putting it together
leaving everybody else behind.
But how do you leave an angel behind?
‘Take me to New York,’ she said,
‘and I will show you new horizons
that haven’t even been invented.’
So we drove to Manhattan,
and rented a loft in Greenwich Village,
and I smoked hash with Jack Kerouac
and Allen Ginsberg chanted mantras
and my angel with a rucksack
sat on her prayer mat in a corner
like a Chinese sage before the Revolution,
saying ‘I believe there are moons,
I believe there are many moons,
but none of them have a daughter,
none of them nurture herds of reindeer.’
You would imagine I’d be happy
after such a holyday vision.
You would imagine any kind of traveller
would be happy to pick up an angel.
But I cannot find the address
of the cold water loft in Greenwich Village,
and Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg
deny any knowledge of my visit,
they say I am just another tourist
trying to find glamour off their fame,
inventing crazy stories about an angel
hitching lifts with complete strangers,
an angel who never revealed her name,
and refused absolutely to open her rucksack.
*William Bedford is a poet, short-story writer and children’s novelist, his work appearing in magazines around the world. His novel Happiland was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and he has received Arts Council and Society of Authors awards for his poetry and fiction.
