Poet L. Ward Abel hears the light beating of wings in an otherwise silent landscape. These wings offer insight into our cacophonous world, “where dreams / ride summer breezes full of thunder / the sound of currents and birds, / a memory of inhaling rain.” Here are the remnants of those who have been hard-wired, but who now stand at the treeline and consider a walk out into the open where “the green air remembers.” Here is a drone's view of the smallest details “from towers around / wide clearing bounces / sounds bespeaking gardens / way off the grid,” reaching the conclusion that “it looks like this / whether I am here or not.” The poems begin, “The Angels Rage Tonight / in overflowing amber chutes,” and they end when “their frequency goes quiet. Then showers follow.” Trying to reconcile “the wing and the anti-wing,” Abel does what we all do, “Skim low the waters / just above a wake.” Using a combination of dream-like imagery and colloquial diction, the poet's unique southern voice comes through the clutter of strange times to slow down the ongoing, to catalog the search, and to try to sing "something like / a sparrow that has fallen."
