The hastily assembled angel thinks He must be more like God than people are Especially because he like God can’t Choose to be less like God      he tilts his chair   Back his brown metal folding      chair on its Back legs and lifts      first his right leg and then His left      onto the wolf-sized rock he’s using As his desk      while the great flood floods the plains   The valleys and the forests far below him And the mountains      eventually his mountain Eventually his right      leg on the rock His left crossed over at the ankles Wanting   To be like God he thinks must be the wrong way To be like God      who doesn’t want to be Like anything      but I don’t want To be like God he’d heard the rising sea   First in his sleep two      nights ago he dreamed A lion roared and couldn’t stop and wept Roaring      and in the dream the angel thought I must record the lion’s roar      and leapt   Down from his cot      in the clouds to a small village Built like a village near a forest from Strong trunks and supple branches      but it stood in A desert      and the roofs were thatched with bones   The angel saw no lion there but heard Its roar and saw      the roaring wind on the weeping Sand      and the weeping sand in the twisting wind And woke on the mountain woke      in falling snow like weeping   Sand      not knowing how he had gotten there     in snow and Warm rain he woke and turned his face away From the sun and saw instead the warm rain tearing Snow from the mountainside he turned      his face and saw   Already he was lost inside God’s plan for the world      again he hadn’t seen In the millennia that must have led To this      moment the workings of the plan   He slapped the ground and stood      he staggered to His folding chair miraculously there Folded and propped against the wolf-sized rock And listened to the weeping and the roar-   ing world below him not      life but the world Itself      thinking      This isn’t      like any oth- er sound      as the storm stripped      comparison from the Earth But the angel kept the wolf in the rock