03.23.26
To the end, a psalm of David
When the prophet Nathan came to him after sleeping with
Bethsabee
Have mercy on me God I know what you are. I know your endless
Passions twisting like snakes made the chaos that makes me.
Annihilate it. Miserere mei Deus secundum magnam
misericordiam tuam. Et secundum multitudinem miserationum
tuarum dele iniquitatem meam.
Soak me wide in the ditch I come from, can you hear me? And wring
me out.
I know what you make me do. It’s spread out in front of me like a
feast of eyes.
Because you cast a stone through the darkness, I’m here, and admit
this: your sermons prove justified. I’ve seen the page they spell
on. Dominate me when I judge you.
For look I am the cistern all sin cradles black and glistening. Tell me
the truth did you imagine me who imagined the world. Ugly
but I was borne of St. Eve Mother of God and that was the
start. I was the fruit and in the fruit rot on the vine. I was
an embryo sweet as liquor. I am devised under the sign of
her oath YES. Hear me and make me again of your flesh.
Look baby I loved you really. Unsure and occulted I was a secret
enclosed in your knowledge. I burst from your skull and left a
mark.
Assault me hyssop and I will be cleansed. Lather me, “I,” and find its
ice.
You gave me my hearing my joy and my sex. You rejoice in the
humble bone.
Turn the pearl in your cheek and slaughter the past.
Rewrite these nerves oh God of the muscle. Restore your wet spirit
inside my wet gore.
Do not swat me from your face or your Holy Spirit rob from me.
Give back the light of your salvation and fix in me the Origin.
I’m not dumb: My enemies are your ways. The wicked are ferns.
Release me from the bloods Lord oh God oh God of the tongues, of
good measure,
Lord speak with my lips and they’ll open only for you.
Because if you want it, I will. If you want this I will
God is the wind bruised? An organ for chewing? Humiliation? You
will not? Disdain? Oh my God
Be kind to the wrestling Lord use yours to smother the sun:
Then I will raise your calves above the altar.
Into the End.
A David Psalm when Nathan came to him—prophetic since
He’d sinned with Bathsheba
Misery me, Deus, on the basis of your great
Miserliness, bomb my rough mountains. Lather me
Again (then x32). Wash my rough mountains
Out of me, and sterilize me from sin, because I’ve trekked
My r. mountains, made a bad heart
out of You. So Judge, You’ll have to, You
Behold: I was conceived
On a rough mountain, and in sin, by Mother,
Therefore behold: I have spoken the truth,
You’ll sprinkle me with hyssop, and I’ll be clean, yes,
I’ll be scrubbed to the Snow Bone.
You’ll thumb a seed of joy
Into my earhole, rejoice. Avert
Thy plastic tune. Firm me up
With the First Oxygen. I’ll demonstrate
And these irreverent hills will turn to you. Absolve,
God, God
My One Salvation, when you peel off the skin of my lips
I’ll give it,
By all means.
But you don’t like the taste of smoke
You are released from. Your fist crushed air. This heart,
Powdered like spices and humiliated, God, how—
I mean, You don’t hate it?
Bring me into existence, kindly, Lord, tomorrow
Is picked up out of the dirt. Then you’ll accept
The sacrifice, and the sorrowful
Flavors of smoke.
Slick calves on Your altar.
And tons of that blue
Blubber of cows, left for the flies to carry up to You.
God Your godhood is unlike my girlhood, You have a vocation, and it fits. You love me, that’s fitting. If You forgive me, better. God Your way over here, please, tell me where we’re going. The ditch next to our highway soaks and gets moving, parallel, I see it, it’s outside me, I could touch it.
The water’s hot in the city, where does that get us? I live in Massachusetts and I do You wrong there, the pipes get rough with mineral, I’m vain, I know I’m right, I drink like that, I rub that in my face. Tap me out of this bus, turn the hose on me.
I pretend my sins count and I count my dreary herd, like wives.
Forget wives. It’s You, it’s just You I wrong, I do poorly while You watch, don’t make me drive. I bulk out Your psalms, I make sure You’re right, over. You speak. You’re found speaking. David never heard of me.
David I am made of eight main primal cuts, I started life bloody, unbelievably small, drowned, stewed, breathless, pre-drowned, reverse digested.
Truthfully, I was born into my problems. I am modeled after a statue of a cow in a Beacon Hill restaurant. Hose me, said the cow, I’m faithful. I tell You what You know. My feet split so I can stand, I had forelegs once and I am covered, to this day, in flies that work for You, I stink a lot like the women’s bathroom of the South Station Bus Terminal, where everyone blinks in the mirror, symmetrical, they get that way.
You’re waving that wet hyssop around on me. You let it drip. Do You seem witchy? But You can take it. You have to wash a sacrifice. Look, pale Emma under this dirt! Now the hyssop-water runs like a stuck faucet, it pools through the plates that wetly bridge her back, at a slant. She’s embarrassed. Yes. But she’s for You.
You can break those plates like bones, You can make the broken plate rejoice. Make me joy in You and I’m whole.
Shut Your wet eyes on my sins, “process” them, whatever.
My heart, Lord, You can split cleanly, wrap neatly, get the bones singing for You.
If You leave again, don’t take back the Pentecost. O I’ll get like Peter.
Again it is nine in the morning.
Again turn me again in my bloodguilt, Lord, I a killer, You the Lord, You the Firstfruit Beginner, Meat Beginner, You the Restoration, You the Universal Recovery of Acts 3:21, and Isaiah too for he said All Flesh, for the butcher divvies You, no anachronisms for You, just You, for You are Just and not just the
God of my salvation. My God of my salvation.
Lord am I still speaking?
If You wanted slaughter You don’t.
You want my heart’s cleanest cut.
When You split Your stones for building, it’s Jerusalem, and when You are good, Your own goodness pleases You.
If it please You Lord build me over. My girlhood You gave like a bull, You blood me, You can make me righteous. And after that, You can cut me an offer. The bus is delayed thirty-seven minutes. At the end, I’ll be built. The bus doors will open like water. At the end is like water. Like the water I’ll be clean.
David to himself, getting it
Bless the one thrown backward into the night by night sin-caked.
Blessed is the man to whom God hasn’t sex assigned. His soul has no
trick inside.
Because I’m silent, my bones are like gnawing plum pits. While all
day I scream like my enemies.
Because you squeeze into something ceaseless, the air around me
spins
Afflicted in a coil. While I smart transfix in me the thorn, the thorn.
Who pierced me, a colt’s soft feet?
So I’ve made known my faults to you oh Lord. I didn’t keep them
hidden like this thorn, this thorn. I said I will subject myself
against myself and reveal my faults to my God. And He will
remit them. Reveal likewise my faults to my enemies oh God. I
don’t want to say how they changed me.
For this the Armenians will ask in due time. But on this flood-dark
edge they do not come to you.
You’re the doorway through which I escape these trials that enclose
me in this room of stone flames.
Extract me and entrap me inside your ecstatic Instead.
I’ll give you what I understand. Everything I have and know I don’t. I want to instruct you in the way you walk. I’ll impress my eye-strings on you. I will nail them to the firmament’s dark hoof.
Don’t be like the horse or mule who thinks a lot. In a harness their jaws are bound. They can’t get near to
you as they desire, they who don’t know they desire.
The sinner’s lashes wish only to get the Lord inside him.
Rejoice in the Lord and exult Him, you who are good.
David to himself,
Who has been realized
The ones who are beautiful are the ones––
a secret. A sheep the Lord has not stuffed
its cloud-meat, nor fraud into its spirit…
I don’t speak. My bones smile at my age,
my screams flick on like daylight.
The split of daylight from grave night,
Super Hand, keep on me.
Each vertebra of mine’s bubble wrap for a thorn––
don’t bother absconding
injustice, Lord Dixi: Confitebor adversus me iniustitiam
Meam Domino (I hope You will excuse me,
it was too pretty in English) and already,
you’ve handed my poems back.
For this, every “shepherd” would pray to you.
I can’t draw near
in this flood of baaing waters,
You’re my plank in these floods, swirl me, My
Praise, pluck me from my circumstances.
I’ll prepare You my life,
I will prove to You my eyes.
Don’t be like those horses, or worse, the mules,
to whom there come no realizations.
Squash their jaws via muzzle, via
rain, who come not near unto Thee.
Mode-of-the-redwing
whips for the sinner. However—air
The Lord chooses whom He praises, and worth covers up his sin. So that’s a man forgiven.
The one who bends for the Lord pours out his breath and it hits the ground like water.
Myself, I was silent, I was on my knees. I could hear them squeak. The lace wasn’t on my head, no culpa fist, You spoke, I did not eat. I lived uneasy in a basement below my neighbors and I saw their chicken coop, low from my bed each morning I saw it. I have no hen for You. Nothing swings from my arm. Still the bones in there, they grind, they groan and I groan when I hear them.
Daily they grind, nightly, that’s how I know Your hand’s on me. It was summer when I lived by that coop. When I cook I butcher the meat poorly, I tie it with twine that chars in the heat, I hack at the wing in search of the joint. The heat, inside and out. I lie to You. If it rained I’d know. SELAH.
But I do know! You rain on the sinner and on the rest too, I’m that sinner, when You send me the squall I remind you—I live in the basement, on Linden Street, by the graveyard, if you rain there’s no cover. Trust me. Uncover me. My cover’s my guilt, You forgive me. I told you all about it, SELAH.
Actually Your saints tell You about it, I’m just hoping they overhear me. They talk to You in Your day, which is like day and night at once, it’s like where You live. When You rain from there, in Your flood.
Your flood, my cover. Your saints hooks I swing from. Your sign the rope burning my joints, it comes loose in the waters, now the water is the sign, the flood is about me:
Deliverance. The flood is singing, it washes in and out of my mouth. SELAH.
I thought it was the flood speaking. The Lord said in the flood, I can see you. I’ll show you how to walk and you’ll walk, with Mine Eye I reach you, you live in my look.