stories no more substantial than the clouds or what had been his face
the view, the wind, the light disposing of the bodies
who walked in the realm of dreams but like everything else

for our having tried to cross the river caught between walls
one could hear a voice “Bear the unbearable”
and the broadcast was at an end

you might relay the message the rivers and mountains remained
the unseen figure of the enemy entirely covered
the central portion of their visual fields this blindness for names

the bone became black with flies again hatching in ruins
here were the black, burnt ceilings and boxes of flags
the walls covered with soot like a kitchen

smaller clouds spread out a golden screen
given the task of painting wounds
through the darkened town as though it had been light

at the moment of the birth of this cloud

The angel handed me a book, saying, “It contains everything
that you could possibly wish to know.” And he disappeared.
       So I opened the book, which was not particularly fat.
       It was written in an unknown character.
       Scholars translated it, but they produced altogether
different versions.
       They differed even about the very senses of their own
readings, agreeing upon neither the tops nor the bottoms of
them, nor upon the beginnings of them nor the ends.
Toward the close of this vision it seemed to me that
the book melted, until it could no longer be distinguished from
this world that is about us.

—Paul Valéry

I would like to express my gratitude to
the closest reader of this work, Henry Mattison,
and also to Svetozár Daniel Simko, Honor Moore, and C. D. Wright.

ALSO BY CAROLYN FORCHÉ

Gathering the Tribes

The Country Between Us

Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness

“The Recording Angel” appeared in Antaeus and then in The Best American Poetry of 1991, edited by Mark Strand and David Lehman (New York: Collier Books, 1992). An early version of “The Notebook of Uprising” appeared in the Twentieth Anniversary Issue of The American Poetry Review in 1993. An early version of “The Angel of History” was published by The Graham House Review in a special issue dedicated to the memory of Terrence Des Pres. “Book Codes” appeared in No Roses Review. I wish to thank the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation for fellowships that enabled this work to be completed.

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.