Albert Huffstickler: "Don't Ask the Angels How They Fly"

Knowing there's only so much time,

I don't rejoice less but more.

Knowing how many things will now

not happen, I wish them Godspeed

and pass them on to someone

down the line. I honor my

regrets, the part of me that

never happened or happened wrong

and proceed on course though

the course is not known. Only

the end is known and some days

it's a comfort. We live on

love, whether it's there or

not and rejoice in it even in

its absence. If I had known,

I'd have come here better equipped—

but that's another one of those

things you can't change—as we

can't alter that part of us

that lives on memory, knowing

all the while that time is not

real and that what we are we

never were in the light of that

timeless place where we really

belong, have belonged always.

And what's left then is only

to bless it all in the light of

what we don't and will never

know or at least not here where

the light is only a shadow of

that light we almost see sometimes—

that light that's really home.

                 On my 69th birthday—Dec. 17, 1996

"Don't Ask the Angels How They Fly" by Albert Huffstickler. Text as published in di.verse.ity: an austin international poetry festival anthology, edited by Scott Wiggerman and Margaret Ward-Barrett (Austin Poets International, Inc., 1997). This anthology is downloadable.

Many thanks to subscriber Jazz Jaeschke for locating the source of this poem.

Art credit: Untitled image from a beautiful set of black and white photographs by Hengki Lee. See the entire gallery at this link.