Do they fly through God’s body and come out singing?

Do they fly through God’s body and come out singing?

Do they swing like children from the hinges

of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?

Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?

What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,

their diet of unfiltered divine light?

What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall

these tall presences can look over and see hell?

If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole

in a river and would the hole float along endlessly

filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?

If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive

in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume

the appearance of the regular mailman and

whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?

No, the medieval theologians control the court.

The only question you ever hear is about

the little dance floor on the head of a pin

where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.

It is designed to make us think in millions,

billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse

into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:

one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,

a small jazz combo working in the background.

She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful

eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over

to glance at his watch because she has been dancing

forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.

Billy Collins

On Writing “Questions About Angels” 2008

I find that it doesn’t take much to get a poem going. A poem can start casually with something trivial and then develop significance along the way. The first inkling may act as a keyhole that allows the poet to look into an imaginary room. When I started to write “Questions About Angels,” I really had nothing on my mind except that odd, speculative question: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Seemingly unanswerable, the question originated as an attempt to mock certain medieval philosophers (notably Thomas Aquinas) who sought to solve arcane theological mysteries through the sheer application of reason. I had first heard the question when I was studying theology at a Jesuit college, but well before that, the phrase had made its way into the mainstream of modern parlance. It was typical of me to want to begin a poem with something everyone knows and then proceed from there. The poem found a direction to go in when it occurred to me to open up the discussion to include other questions. At that point, it was “Game on.”

My investigation really begins in the second stanza, which draws on traditional images of angels in religious art, either worshipping God or paying helpful visits to earth, assisting the poor and protecting the innocent. Then the questions become more fanciful — off-the-wall, really: “Do they fly through God’s body and come out singing?” No doubt you could come up with questions of your own about angel behavior; clearly, that has become the poem’s game — an open inquiry into the spirit life of these creatures.

After the poem’s most bizarre question, which involves a hole that a fallen angel has left in a river, the interrogation descends into the everyday with the image of an angel delivering mail, not gloriously “in a blinding rush of wings” but just like “the regular mailman.” After a reminder of the monopoly “the medieval theologians” seem to have on questions about angels, the poem makes a sudden turn (one I did not see coming) by offering a simple, irreducible answer to that unanswerable question. On the little word “but” (line 29), the poem drops down abruptly from “billions” to “one,” and the scene shrinks from heaven to a jazz club located in eternity.

In the process of composing a poem, the poet is mentally juggling many concerns, one of the most dominant and persistent being how the poem is going to find a place to end, a point where the journey of the poem was meant to stop, a point where the poet does not want to say any more, and the reader has heard just enough. In this case, the moment she appeared — rather miraculously, as I remember — I knew that this beautiful angel “dancing alone in her stocking feet” was how the poem would close. She was the hidden destination the poem was moving toward all along without my knowing it. I had only to add the detail of the bored bassist and the odd observation that even musicians playing in eternity cannot be expected to stay awake forever.

Considerations for critical thinking & writing: Questions about Angels

1. What questions might you have about angles?
2. Give some thought to the meanings of the descriptions of angles in each stanza. …
3. What is the tone of the poem? …Based on these factors, how would you describe the purpose of the poem?

Last Completed Projects