Wing Beaten

You and your angels you kvetch about,
You and your shrecklich puppets—we doubt
You ever saw such avatars, doubt

You ever had a conversation
With someone with dwarfism who spoke
About how his hands hopped like small toads,

How God left him waiting, forsaken,
To be returned to the dump, his face
Ready to shine clear and bright but placed

At the level of hounds. Your mistake
Was to practice ventriloquism
With the lines that ventriloquized you,

But then, maybe you wanted them to.
A century on, they’re more than you,
Crooked, skeletal syllogism:

A poet is never the voices
With which poems’ phrases pretend to speak.
Later, the reader’s only choice is

To locate the truth in this technique
Of vaudeville as each poem deploys it.
Yours stared at angels but spoke as freaks,
Which means you mourned your words’ rejoicing.