KEEP PLANNING time / space / about #073 Eric Angal 2 Poems

To the Archipelago A bandy-legged jaunt through severe history: we rode till break of day, the sunlight shivering out from the mountains’ pudenda with all the subtlety of a virgin birth. I looked for you at the platform, where I was surrounded by children, homeward bound on the eve of their long holiday— you had already left, to Luoyang, or somewhere potentially older. ‘But where could be older than that?’ The astronomers convened, suggested a land where the grass persisted to the mouth of the sea. I boarded the train amid their tearful well-wishes. The coming south flew bitterly against the windows, and I had no money for lunch. After the Fall My holiday was ruined, twenty tonnes of peated whisky lost in peasant revolt; my debtors cinched my arms with twine and wrung my teeth from me; someone famous commissioned your portrait in summerclothes, and I saw less of you… Yet I am not forsaken. A stirring image persists: the color of your legs as they wetten in the mineral vapor of a sulfate spring, yes, I have that— and all the spies of Herod could not wrest it from me.

*** Eric Angal is a writer from Seattle. 14 November 2026