poeticus
unlike the heady air of paperwhites,
my slow, odoriferous return
to dust. We are full of what? Shit occurs
to me. And the Spirit would concur.
True, it is said when we pray, our words
are, to God, as incense. But how is this?
For they are rank with resistance
to the holy and with lust, their language
reeking with vengeance toward our enemies.
Deliver us, good Lord, from awful praying.
May the rhetorically repulsive be
removed to an air-tight composter.
Not so my blooming paperwhites. I enter
the apartment, inhale—and remember:
You have set your glory above the heavens.
Psalm 8:1
Instructions, with a Question
On a clear dry night, assign the bright stars
proximity, the dim ones the greater
distances; give your sight time to adjust,
and the heavens will assume relative
dimension, seem to deepen.
Tell your high-minded scientific friends
to lighten up, get the picture: Milton’s
winged Satan, hungry, descending from sphere
to sphere, eyeing the sparrow-brained and blind.
Humankind, that is. Lunch meat. Look again:
the moon and planets, stars and, it would seem,
nothing else. Good thing, bad thing? Nothing
we can do about it. Any number
of futures left wholly to us. And that glory!
Let the nations know they are but men.
Psalm 9:20
Forget God
“It is natural to fight,” he says, leaning
against the water cooler, the counselor’s
room tight with boys with suntanned chests.
His name is Jorge. He is from Mexico.
Later that night, he will also tell us
we do not know how to treat a woman.
This is not a movie. It is Tuesday.
We are all sixteen years old and looking
for a truth to try on like a boxer’s robe.
(What is summer camp good for, if not this?)
Jorge’s truth is pure silk—“Hermanos,
nature compels our defense of high ground”—
and we believe everything he says,
beginning, that night, with his eyes and grin.
His enemies are crushed, they collapse.
Psalm 10:10
The Wicked Man
Opening King David, the reader may
resist initially the heavy ink
against “the wicked man,” dismiss the pitch
as rhetorically transparent, the cant
of every royal house, their fear showing.
This reader may also own a horse farm,
manage a hedge fund. Other readers—
think poor and disenfranchised, the wards
of insolvent nation-states—are without
hope in this heavy world, except one: God
will break the arms of all who hold themselves
beyond account. The wicked man
is no mere figure of speech.
Ask the miserable.
When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?
Psalm 11:3
Snapshot
Psalm Eleven, here’s the picture: of a god
who hates all purveyors of violence
and answers their mere bows and arrows with
an apocalyptic maelstrom. What I see:
a comedy—no laughing matter—where
the villains receive what they’ve intended
for their victims, who then inherit all
the thugs had planned for themselves. Think Esther.
But who gives a damn for any of this
or cares what it may mean? See there, outside
the window, the faithfulness of daybreak
slanting orange through a scrim of new snow.
We own our lips—who is our master?
Psalm 12:4
Reasons I Write
Those who assume they have no one
to whom they must account for their words—
like politicians, bankers, older brothers,
theologians, poets, headmasters—
they are wrong. Every knee will bow, every
tongue confess. So I do not use words
like “shit” or “Sovereign Lord” unaware.
Berryman, after Hopkins,
