Angels don’t come to the reservation.”
-- Speaker (Line 1)

Importance: This line opens the poem, and frames its concern with angels. From the outset, the speaker is confident in declaring that “angels don’t come,” emphasized in the use of a self-contained end-stop line. Initially, we might see the absence of angels as indicating something about the reservation itself, perhaps the “death” (4) that lurks within it. Upon rereading, we see how the speaker has made use of angels to destabilize the semantic associations between angels and heavenly goodness: they don’t come to the reservation because they remain indifferent in their “own distant heavens” (24). The realities of native American existence, impoverishment and marginalization have nothing to do with them even if, ironically, it has everything to do with the angels’/white people’s colonization of native American land.

Gabriel? Never heard of him. Know a guy named Gabe though— / he came through here...
-- Speaker (Line 7 - 9)