so the angel Gabriel kept his word
and hid his face for my own good he spoke
things that I couldn’t understand I was
filled with sparks and my joints began
to burn and the sky above the interstate
was a needlepoint of my life and I
could finally see how eternity
was not the same thing as forever but
rather an all-at-onceness which really
makes time a kind of grace that protects us
from something like the expanse of the sky
or the reality of such a feeling
in a vast field the universe falling
around me like a veil and then lifted