Privelege of Being, by Robert Hass

• Many are making love. Up above, the angels
• in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing
• are braiding one another’s hair, which is strawberry blond
• and the texture of cold rivers. They glance
• down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy—
• it must look to them like featherless birds
• splashing 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 man
• tugging the curtain rope in the dark theater?
• Anyway, they do, they look at each other;
• two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,
• startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet
• lubricious glue, stare at each other,
• and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically
• like lithographs of Victorian beggars
• with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags
• in the lewd alleys of the novel.
• All of creation is offended by this distress.
• It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,
• rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
• it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
• they close their eyes again and hold each other, each
• feeling the mortal singularity of the body
• they 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 realized
• that you could not, as much as I love you,
• dear heart, cure my loneliness,
• wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him
• that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
• And the man is not hurt exactly,
• he understands that his life has limits, that people
• die young, fail at love,
• fail of their ambitions. He runs beside her, he thinks
• of the sadness they have gasped and crooned their way out of
• coming, clutching each other with old, invented
• forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready
• to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely
• companionable like the couples on the summer beach
• reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes
• to themselves, and to each other,
• and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.