your friends. Go see the fireworks every
night, all night; one long night. You will all wish
you were dead. That this satire of heaven
would have had a Maker. That the humming
in all that dark matter would mean something.
Psalm 103
Bless the Lord, O my soul
O bless the Lord, my soul, whoever you
may be, you keeper of our memories:
you, whom I call mine though I am yours—I,
the day-to-day perception and illusion,
the child of the unconscious mind, body’s
bedfellow, servant, and traducer, dead
in a sweet dream of aphrodesia, dead
in the lost cause of astronomy: me,
loved?—not the clothes horse I know. But someone
I don’t know who knows me is loved: you
the aromatic of the lotus rose,
beloved of the one and only One,
loved, loved—and you know what I only wound
and crucify: bless the Lord, O my soul!
Psalm 104
thou art clothed with honor and majesty
What clothing! O Lord my God, we worship
your clothes. Our God’s a fashionable God;
no Presbyterian. New money. Not
a Catholic. Evangelical—furnished
with effective praise—no make-up except
will, lots of it, nothing but it, explaining
things to us inerrantly on the page—
a potentate to pagans. When the step-
son appeared we were rightly skeptical
and remain so. He was everything You
are not—visible in the dark, insolvent.
He walked, he loved, he ridiculed, he slept.
You tried to save him from his followers,
but there was nothing You could do.
Psalm 105
sing psalms unto him (a)
I’d like to have an audience of One—
but then again, I’m not so sure—who knows
aesthetics and appreciates a rhyme
that’s just a hint in a rhythmic poem
even when the candy of its images
is metallic as blood, or when all you
get is visual assonance—ambiguity
be damned sometimes, when what the poem says
is all it says, as if Lord Tennyson
had eaten Eliot for breakfast, won—
an audience appreciative of form,
who sits up nights admiring human wit;
sly, kind, ironic, sad. [Here, warm applause
from the audience inside the poet.]
sing psalms unto him (b)
Unto whom else? Many of us have no
reader but the One who hears in secret:
“for I say unto you, when you pray, go
alone into your room and close your door;
the One who hears in secret will reward
you.” On the busy streets no one will know
I was not good enough for anyone
but myself. (I planned to write “anyone
but God,” but who could be that good or bad?
Is God who wants my poetry only
in my head?—He and I two kindly old
gents content, yea, pleased, with the mediocre;
one formerly in shorts—tan, grassy lad;
the other a Whirlwind of white and gold.)
seek his face
Your face is home, and nothing else we have
is ours. The universe’s filigree
of fire and colors and geometry
a billion billion deep is its own grave,
a vast performance of holes and splendor
perishing: an image always leaving
its mirror in our mind, magician’s sleeve,
a shimmering house with its key next door
in Grampa’s overalls pocket. He sits
at his little kitchen table, coffee
in an old cup warmed up from yesterday,
sugar cube a diamond die of snow, listening
to the radio, musing memories,
begetting you and everything he sees.
Psalm 106
they soon forgot his works
The supersized blue star Rigel, sixty
thousand times brighter than the sun, collapses
someday soon: its heated sacrifices—
the nitrogen of sons and daughters stripped
and
