Psalms for Skeptics. Kent Gramm
otherwise all right.”
I’d take it with that quiet sense of humor
and know my Norsk without a dictionary;
and what he would assume, I would assume
peacefully, without that thousand-yard stare.
Whatever we were missing would be home.
Whatever he would wonder I would know.
My heart won’t let me live that long or see
that much. My two dry retinas are loose
already, tacked back down like parchment sewn
with scabby threads. I hear a dimming fizz
day and night. I have my first heart attack
under my belt and under my skin. Nights
aren’t so good. I’m afraid of being sick.
If twenty years from now I’m still alive,
my teeth will be Chinese, I’ll have steel knees,
and if I still can get around at all
I’ll scuff from room to room reciting Keats
and urinating in my pants. My walker
will say “Kent.” If beauty walks with Jesus,
someday soon the truth will walk with me.
He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death.
The light. “Move toward the light,” they said. And then,
the name of Jesus on his lips, he breathed
his last. The lights and lines on the machines
unlit, and the last pressure left his hand.
The circle stood around his bed in light
they couldn’t see, but they had heard the name
whispering through the crowd when Jesus came
healing, casting demons back into night,
telling the dead what they wanted to hear:
“Rise; come forth! I am the resurrection
and the Life.” And then his mouth fell open;
they shuddered—one of them caressed his hair;
they wept. He looked at them, adjusted sight,
rose following the rumor toward the light.
he satisfieth the longing soul
The dead man rose—his spirit, that is, rose—
and regularly is in touch with us
through mediums, cats, and the garden hose,
though we are usually busy or obtuse;
but it’s the thought that counts. Surely he thinks—
of us, I mean; or, well, of anything.
Does he need to think? What does he think with?
Does he ponder and discover his sins?
What are sins but despair, longing denied?—
and now he has his longing back, repaired,
the sins unnecessary, satisfied
like flowers with their water, light, and air;
like earth content with earth, and dust with dust.
Then what are we to him, or he to us?
he brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death
Just leave her, Johnny, leave her—this soft ship
you won by birth: carpentered its green keel,
its twitchy rudder to its overweening
prow, rough-hewing it quick chip by quick chip,
stepping a mainmast shaped by other hands,
reefing sails to the wind’s ghostly heartbeat,
working its veins and arteries like sheets—
and now the anchor drags and holds to land.
Step ashore and leave the corpse on the table,
the undertaker’s forceps in her chest,
embalming fluid flooding her grey veins:
say goodbye, let her lie, and let her rest,
for not a hair nor heartbeat can be saved.
She brought you to the shore’s forgiving breast.
Psalm 108
I will sing
My sonnet is a song of prayer—lament
and dismay at having to do without;
or wish-like vision “stricken-through with doubt;”
sometimes a moody new Jerusalem
of pagan sacrifice and praise, raw awe
and horror discordant, blaring like brass
and dental as gold in an out-held hand,
metered to pieces, obedient to law.
And sometimes the listener writes the lines,
composes the notes—and then I listen
more than complain. It isn’t praise I hear;
it is my own heartbeat listening blind,
shuddering at the universal scare
and clawing the scales for intervals of air.
Psalm 109
They remember not to show mercy, but persecute the poor and needy, and even slay the broken in heart.
The broken-hearted fill the earth like krill;
we feed on them, mouths wide as enterprise—
or else why would the desperate buy and buy?
We feed them diabetes and send our bill.
We have the law and profits on our side;
the churches of the dream are telecast
on screens the size of football fields. The last
Mohican signed his ballpoint x and died.
But let us give ourselves to prayer. The Lord
forgive us these our little sins; be pleased
to overlook the great: our blaspheming
the Holy Ghost, the infinitely poor,
whose universe was sold for the spare parts.
She broods and mourns. We’re told it broke her heart.
Psalm 110
he shall judge among the heathen
The heathen went with Robert Kennedy
some distant place where being born again
is wise but doesn’t matter worth a damn;
or they are marching to Montgomery
singing the old songs, walking hand in hand
with Bobby, Martin, Abraham, and John;
or they took the next bus for Birmingham
to see that insolently naïve swan
stagger on the cold wind, and try again.
Let