Opening King David. Brad Davis

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ