A Vision

A (nondream? hypnogogic?) vision, 1965 or '66, by Denise Levertov

"The intellectual love of a thing is the understanding of its perfection."
Spinoza, quoted by Ezra Pound

Two angels among the throng of angels paused in the upward abyss, facing angel to angel. Blue and green glowed the wingfeathers of one angel, from red to gold the sheen of the other's. These two, so far as angels may dispute, were poised on the brink of dispute, brink of fall from angelic stature, for these tall ones, angels whose wingspan encompasses entire earthly villages, whose heads if their feet touched earth would top pines or redwoods, live by their vision's harmony which sees at one glance the dark and light of the moon. These two hovered dazed before one another, for one saw the seafeathered, peacock breakered crests of the other angel's magnificence, different from his own, and the other's eyes flickered with vision of fame petallings, cream-gold grainfeather glitterings, the wings of his fellow and both in immortal danger of dwindling, of dropping into the remote forms of a lesser being. But as these angels, the only halted ones among the many who passed and repassed, trod air as swimmers tread water, each gazing on the angelic wings of the other, the intelligence proper to great angels flew into their wings, the intelligence called intellectual love, which, understanding the perfections of scarlet, leapt up among blues and greens strongshafted, and among amber down illumined the sapphire bloom, so that each angel was iridescent with the strange newly-seen hues he watched; and their discovering pause and the speech their silent interchange of perfection was never became a shrinking to opposites, and they remained free in the heavenly chasm, remained angels, but dreaming angels, each imbued with the mysteries of the other.