Before I introduced Ralph Angel at his reading at the University of New Orleans, in 2015, I asked him if he had anything he wanted me to highlight. He said to focus on his poetry, rather than his work as an educator. A bold request for a University reading, but accurate. He was, above all else, a poet. For many of us, this bold self-identification made him a powerful mentor. 

“Poet” is a frightening identity to claim; the claim rarely elicits a neutral response. In a deeply frightening world, embracing a life devoted to beauty, meaning, wonder, and joy, can feel frivolous, reckless, even.

When I was Ralph’s student, he taught me that being a poet isn’t about mastery of theory or analysis or craft, but about living life “as a poet.” In the megalomaniac way of twenty-year olds, I felt certain my cinematic overtures and manic-pixie-dream-girl antics handily qualified. Re-visiting his essays, reflecting on our conversations, and sitting with his poems, I don’t think he meant joie de vivre or whimsy when he instructed his students to live like poets. I think he meant to live attentively, to keep the heart trained on beauty. 

It’s easy to slip into cynical perceptions—that wonder is incidental, beauty non-essential, meaning arbitrary or contrived. Ralph and his legacy challenge the impulse to cynicism. His work is saturated with presence. He wrote with the clarity and particularity of someone who completely inhabited his moments. His poems continue to invite a profound quality of attention—a rare treasure in our cultural moment. His poems don’t just point to details, they live in them, expand them, enliven each. Inviting us to pay attention, his poems continue to enliven us, too.

 — Jessica Morey-Collins

Alpine Wedding

All dark morning long the clouds are slowly rising up
beneath us, and we are fast asleep.
The mountains unmove

intensely. And so do we. Meadows
look down.

A city there looks up and
stirs a little. Adrift the rolling tiled roofs of
buildings, the deadly

trains of grinding sand and morning—
a spy unfolds his paper,

the coffee’s served.

A bride and groom stand shivering on a tarmac
in the mist, and
they are happy. Each one

and all of us entangled, the room is moist with us,
the house unfinished, windowless,

and we are fast asleep.

The brother of the groom can’t get
close enough. He leans against the brightest ridge
and ladder, the sucking

sound of memory
as heaven picks up speed and

hurtles through his burning skin
its frozen blankets
to the sun.

Ralph Angel, “Alpine Wedding” from Twice Removed. Copyright © 2001 by Ralph Angel.
Source: Twice Removed (Sarabande Books, 2001)

This

Today, my love,
leaves are thrashing the wind
just as pedestrians are erecting again the buildings
   of this drab
forbidding city,
and our lives, as I lose track of them,
are the lives of others derailing in time and
getting things done.
Impossible to make sense of any one face
or mouth, though
each distance
is clear, and you are miles
from here.
Let your pure
space crowd my heart,
that we might stay a while longer amid the flying
debris.
This moment,
I swear it,
isn’t going anywhere. 

Source: Poetry (June 2001)

Half Circle

Your body has recovered you.
Fog, or stars, a leaf of spring, the little
veins you’re tracing, the world’s
still healthy here.  
And mother’s well, though
you’re her sister now.
The man who always loved you
thinks he’s free. The woman
who loved your husband
wants your sympathy.
And lawyers come.
Accountants.
You can talk to them
at least, and do, the way
the city’s here.

A rock’s thrown
through the window.
A man’s beaten in the hall.
The same young woman, night to night,
sleeps against your door.
The man who always loved you
thinks that you
belong to him. The woman
who loved your husband
counts you as a friend.
A new neighbor
phones. Bankers
call. Even the girl who
stole your purse tracks you down.
You can’t accept, of course.
Her need is greater.

Source: Poetry (June 2001)

In Every Direction

As if you had actually died in that dream
and woke up dead. Shadows of untangling vines
tumble toward the ceiling. A delicate
lizard sits on your shoulder, its eyes
blinking in every direction.

And when you lean forward and present your
hands to the basin of water, and glimpse the glass face
that is reflected there, it seems perfectly at home
beneath the surface, about as unnatural
as nature forcing everyone to face the music
with so much left to do, with everything
that could be done better tomorrow, to dance
the slow shuffle of decay.

Only one season becoming another,
continents travelling the skyway, the grass
breathing. And townspeople, victims, murderers,
the gold-colored straw and barbed-wire hair of the world
wafting over the furrows, the slashed roads
to the door of your office or into the living room.

The towel is warm and cool, soft to the touch,
but in another dream altogether
a screen door creaks open, slams shut
and across the valley a car’s headlights swing up
and over. And maybe you are the driver
with both hands on the wheel, humming a tune
nobody’s ever heard before,

or maybe the woman on the edge of the porch,
grown quiet from fleeing,
tough as nails.

Source: Poetry (July 1991)