The Angel in the Streets

[This year is the 20th anniversary of Cape Cod Light by Michael Hattersley. The other parts of this series are here.]

Michael wrote three published books: a textbook for business students called Management Communication: Principles and Practice that grew out of his work at Harvard Business school (which is still in print), Cape Cod Light, of course, and a third called Socrates and Jesus: The Argument That Shaped Western Civilization.

Micheal’s mother was a proper British Anglican. She met my grandfather during the war while he had some R&R time in England. They were married after a whirlwind courtship and Michael grew up an army brat at army bases around the world, until they settled in my grandfather’s home state of Connecticut. Shortly after my mother was born, my  grandfather stopped touring, and they became a nuclear family of five.

Michael was not religious—the closest he came was his nonbeliever’s appreciation for the spectacle of the midnight Christmas Eve High Mass, which we attended once or twice at grandmum’s request, and the poetry of the King James Bible. But his childhood religious education stuck with him, and he wrote with authority about the Gospels’ place in literature and Jesus’s place in history.

Toward the end of his life, he consolidated much of his thoughts about the tension between the Enlightenment and Christianity into a single book, and had it published at a small press with essentially no marketing. I know he hoped it would gain more traction than it ever did; it’s still in print, though and you can find it on Amazon. It’s a good book!

The sixth poem in Cape Cod Light is less concrete than the others, about a lover walking the streets of a city, and his interactions with an angel (that is, perhaps, the city itself?) I’m not actually sure what inspired it or what Michael had in mind, but there are echoes here of lyrics from his all-time favorite album, Graceland:

A man walks down the street
It’s a street in a strange world
Maybe it’s the third world
Maybe it’s his first time around
Doesn’t speak the language
He holds no currency
He is a foreign man
He is surrounded by the sound, the sound
Cattle in the marketplace
Scatterings and orphanages
He looks around, around
He sees angels in the architecture
Spinning in infinity
He says, “Amen and Hallelujah!”

It perhaps also contains allusions to Angels in America, which I have not seen.

[The Angel in the Streets first appeared in the Spring 1995 issue of The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review.]


The Angel in the Streets

As you walk past, the music behind a door
Draws you, like a lover
Who isn’t sure it’s time to go. The sky
Prepares a background of stars, and behind it
An angel trembles at the approach of a possible god
And numbers his imperfections. The mindless vibration
Rumbles off to another part of the heavens, and the angel
Reflects how divine action is arbitrary,
Without consciousness except in its effects,
Fatal. His attention turns
To the lover, who tells his imagined errors. The angel
Throws his face into his hands and weeps.
He changes nothing.
Would not if he could. But his radiance
Penetrates the lover, and he sings, and the song
Blares from a radio into the street. Children
Plot the outlines of their games, every pedestrian
Watches where he walks, and under a new moon
The loved one walks the city, thinking of love,
Of how it must be earned. And the face, tone, gesture,
The unexpected patch of bloom in the pavement
That moves the heart up or down,
The bronze door, pigeons, colliding crowds
Unfold themselves, like the ragged fragments of an angel.


The next poem is here.

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