Psalms for Skeptics. Kent Gramm
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 spread across wide open spaces of waste—
will hollow out its core like a nation
sucking the blood of its poor. Thin marrow
sipped from their bones, they become dry shadows
circling to the bottom of a hand cupped
around a black and blood-stained hole—erupting
to a supernova—flambeau of gas
blue, white, red—wild excess!—its shredding flower
the settling shoulder of Orion’s power.
Heed, ye heathen!—the heavy torch is passed.
they murmured in their tents
They murmured in their tents, some centuries
before they were Jews—just Joe and Susie
Blow in the desert: something anybody
would have done—Arabs, campers, Comanches,
men, women. A tent is made for murmuring—
for a muffled, airy cinnamon breeze
under colored shade, warm afternoon peace—
made for murmuring and for being heard—
murmuring like water, murmuring like
a distant caravan, murmuring like
people lying looking up at the stars;
and who in the world do we think we are
to sleep under these stitches of glittering light?
he is good
The Lord is good, and everything is one.
I can’t believe Nels Mickleson is dead,
so set my memory of him—face red,
alive. What do I care for sunken bones,
stones, or all the comfort under the sun?
Lord, let me see him on his porch again—
the one on Ninth Street—but as he was then
and not in memory. Memory’s done.
The heart’s done. It’s just a matter of time
and it will all be done—everything one:
one old stone in the cold—or in the mind
of Mr. Mickelson, the universe
drawing in like sand down the rounding course
of his life, in that chair, in the sublime.
Psalm 107
O give thanks unto the Lord
I’ve always pictured me as Grampa, sitting,
remembering, beneath the big old oak
out back—except that I would be more fit,
enough to walk downtown and cast a vote
for Lincoln come back joking from the dead.
I’d hear pretty good and still have my sight;
no hardening or hammer in my head.