Carmen Butcher

The Salvation of Our Space
(after Rilke)

"Über uns hinüber spielt dann der Engel"

In the spaces of the invisible
between meaning and
understanding in the space
a child knows between
world and toy as en-
chanted where angels speak
without words and know
without thought and fly
without wings and sing
without music in this
space we move and love
and have our mutual being

The day after Thanksgiving came on the west coast

this year, the raindrops singing, and I was falling asleep
the first time I heard a "suck-back" preacher at Macedonia
Baptist, a small white church as close to the highway as
southern humidity and open on that treeless knoll to the sky
in a way those pew-minds were not.

He mostly stole the air from the room as his almighty finger fell
only with divine logic on a passage in the Bible not printed in the

almost wordless, typo-ridden bulletin, and when he was spent,
sweat slopped in salty drops down his forehead, I heard an old lady

behind me whisper, "I don't know what he said but wasn't he wonderful,
Praise the Lord," and I knew I was indeed saved bumping into soft
polyester behinds as I pressed toward that oblong promise of food for my
lungs.

And ever since that lightning bolt of croup in a grown man
split my child-mind I have been listening to anything with
oxygen.

The raindrops are singing of a big blue tomorrow that will fill my
nose with grace.

Carmen Butcher writes: I have a Ph.D. but don't hold it against me. I grew up near Atlanta and studied at The University of Georgia. I was a Fulbright Scholar in London ten years ago studying Anglo-Saxon. Now I'm a stay-at-home mother in Northern California. I chase my daughter, play with my husband, edit books, and write (revise) poetry and hate to cook.