Angel Face
from The Persistence of Objects
Looking into her eyes was like playing with
matches in a gas-filled room. You’d just as well try making love to
an angel. Driving an ambulance, you see a lot. One afternoon I
retrieved a blonde’s head from a culvert.
But nothing got me ready for Diane Tremayne.
Not even all those other Dianes and Dianas in my life, so many I
referred to them by number—Diane #1, Diane #1, a Dina, a Dinah, a
Dee Dee. I see now they were practice, maybe warnings.
Diane Tremayne. She’d come toward you
looking up with those eyes so innocent, in her pink bathrobe with
the shoulder pads and tiny waist cinched tight, and next thing you
know you’re bent over her while she’s arched backward above her
husband’s semiconscious body in the back of your ambulance.
You’ve turned off the radio, and she’s got
the keys anyway. You don’t tell her that her face is doing this
changing thing, changing from one face to another, into the faces of
all the other Dianes you’ve known. Like she really is an angel, one
of those dark ones who can pull you down through the sheets and
you’re falling through icy clouds.
published in Speechless the Magazine from a theme section, Five Poets Takes on the Movies
Robin Reagler 