His hands are rough,
but his eyes are kind,
and his voice is familiar enough—
though the anesthesia hasn’t worn off,
I can recognize it at once
when he whispers to me
after the scan.
I glance over at him
from the hospital bed
and what strikes me first
is how big
his frame is.
When he rises from the chair
where he’s been waiting,
he stands and he stands:
so tall, so proud.
Majestic.
An angel.
He is, after all, an angel.
And though I tell him I’ve lived
a good life,
that I find, in this moment, that I’m ready
to make my report to our God…
as angels sometimes do,
he offers me the chance
to wrestle.
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James Goldberg began writing the poems that would appear in Phoenix Song, including “The Angel of Death,” in the fall of 2015, after receiving a diagnosis of cancer relapse. He has since risen from the ashes to publish a stack of collections. He is currently president of the Association for Mormon Letters.
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