Annunciation with zero point field

John Burnside (2005). Annunciation with zero point field in The Good Neighbour. Cape Poetry

Sitting up late in the dark
I think you're about to tell me
that story I've heard before 

of a creature pulled from the ice, or prised from a ditch,
its body a hundred years old, but the eyes intact
and hardly a trace of decay 

on the frost-white skin;
and later, how they cut along the spine
and found two spurs of cartilage above 

the shoulder blades: not wings,
or not quite wings,
but something like a memory of flight 

locked in a chamber of bone
it had barely abandoned.
Sitting up late at night, in a clouded room, 

I think you have something to tell
that I'd want to believe
no matter how improbable it seemed, 

but that was long ago
and anyhow
we have so much that seems improbable: 

the household we have in common
but don't quite share,
sub voce songs, the garden's unnamed roses, 

this angel that comes to our bed
in a shimmer of light
and hangs there, silent, waiting to be nourished. 

You'd think it would choose its moment,
flickering out of the light and assuming a form
or coming to rest for a while 

in muscle and tendon.
You'd think it was eager to speak
as if it had come 

for no other reason than this, its annunciation
life-size, in human terms - an impending birth,
or something else we understand as grace -

the word in its mouth like a plum that has almost ripened,
the sound it will make when it speaks
like falling rain;

but this is the probable world, this is ourselves,
and the one thing we know for sure is that everything comes
by chance, and is half-unwilling,

memory, love, the angel who cannot announce
the fact that, the moment it speaks,
it will fade to nothing.

I've seen it on occasion, like a bat
flicking from wall to wall, its wings like tar
in the yellowing darkness;

I've heard the creak and whisper of the night's
improbable apparatus, lacewings and frost
and starlight on the rooftops like a veil

but nothing has ever spoken, nothing has come
from the elsewhere I measure out in songs and dreams,
although I glimpse, in spite of what I know,

the guessed-at world where nothing has been said
but everything is on the point of speaking:
you in your chair, looking up from a half-read book

as the angel who cannot exist is replaced by the given,
the sullen gift of everyday events:
the promise of rain, a footfall, the dread of belonging.