Psalms for the Poor
Kent Gramm
Psalms for the Poor
Copyright © 2015 Kent Gramm. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-2597-7
EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-2598-4
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
for Robert
Psalm 1
the law of the Lord
1
This is the Law. The Law is everything:
a sad man cherishing a slice of pumpkin
pie, a wife of dreamy cream beside him
snowy white and fluffed, the winter sun dim
through the coffee shop window, many voices
moaning round of romance. This is a race
of rock-loving farmers and brooding, pacing
kings, cancer in the genes. There are no choices.
Glaciers melt in Odysseus’s face;
Athena looks around and packs it in,
reports to God that everything done brings
unintended consequences. “There’s grace,”
God says with a sly everlasting grin.
The memory of love checks her watch, sings.
2
But I was saying, everything is Law—
the brooks, stones, companionship, suffering.
How does a constellation wheel? Its spring
is in the numbers dribbling along awe
like jewelly bread crumbs. It’s all in numbers,
all of it, right down to the ants. And chance
is covered too, explainable to parents
on a planet circling Arcturus—blurs
in our best telescopes but intelligent.
Nothing is, that is not the Law. Always
two plus two is four; passion is always
red, purity blue, Son of God argent;
I will always remember you. I sit
with the sun going down, and this is it.
3
Can it be written in a book, the Law?
Some book, with pages like accordions,
print vigorous as spermatozoa,
punctuation bright as a million suns,
an index hot and right as algebra—
its states like H2O a trinity
transforming on the page, liquid fiction
crystallizing with a sheen: history
now, nonfiction, suffering and death—“one
damn thing after another”—how it bleeds
its ink! And then, the last chapter a gas,
white-winged horses farther than eye can see
converge to Brahman minuscule and vast,
a Way that rises into poetry.
He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water,
that bringeth forth his fruit in his season.
Unless I touch his hand and lay my fingers
to his healing side I’ll say he’s a ghost,
like King Saul or Auntie Maud—in the clothes
of my low brain, that will see anything
I want to see. But my hand is something
else—it won’t lie to me, it won’t believe;
it was this that plucked the fruit off the tree
in the Garden and it knows everything
and nothing. You will call me The Doubter.
I will believe only what I can feel
and nothing I am told. Words are nothing,
but when I feel His hand like living water
I will draw it to me like a willow tree
and I will believe; so all in its season.
Psalm 2 (a)
Why do the heathen rage?
The heathen rage because they hate our freedoms,
and their brides desire our televisions sets.
They crave attention and our Happy Meals;
they wish they could play for the New York Jets;
they wish they could be all that they can be.
The more we give, the more they try to get.
They are crazy to be Americans.
Give them half a chance and they’d be Cheyennes,
Santee
