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Blessed is he who meditates day and night.

Psalm 1:1–2

Ashre

This time the collision wasn’t fatal;

I knocked the doe off the road and backed up

to check. In my low beams, her head high,

those giant black eyes blinked slowly, confused.

Difficult this morning to concentrate

on the psalmic text—Happy is the man

whose delight is in the law of the Lord—

which feels irrelevant to everything

that has been flailing at my heart these days.

But how else to learn an answer for how

the tyranny of bleak appearances

drains the soul of all will to persevere?

He is a tree whose leaf does not wither.

I am like chaff that the wind blows away.

Be warned, you rulers of the earth.

Psalm 2:10

Hard Times

We wait out this blizzard at the far edge

of whatever suffering it may pile on

the less well kept. Easy for us to love

the bride-white beauty through our air-tight

windows or even brave the elements

one well-plowed mile for two-dollar coffees

at our favorite Zagat-rated café.

Never without a log for the fireplace,

we are thankful for our comforts, though we

sign contracts for these benefits insured

by policies that conspire against all

for whom there remains no room in the inn.

Easy to feel the innkeeper’s bind

with the wind chill pushing twenty below.

May your blessing be on your people.

Psalm 3:8

Among the Living

We lie down and sleep; and we wake again.

Like dying, or the way I wish it were.

The Lord gives to his beloved sleep, but

few care. Those who do I tend to welcome

as I do your eyes morning to morning.

Evening to evening, the pace picking up,

we lie down and sleep; we wake again,

our field of vision—blink—stroboscopic.

Blink again—we are surrounded by foes

who loathe our sloth, regard my love

to laze beside you of no benefit

to the commonweal. Which is true. So I

may quit my day job. What will they say then?

We lie down and sleep—and wake again.

How long, O men, will you love delusions and seek false Gods?

Psalm 4:2

Against Solipsism

Is it unacceptably romantic

to say aloud that urban poetry

reads as if it needs to get out more, needs

more than a holiday in the country

to curb its solipsistic tendencies?

Most of the universe is—pause—nature.

Imagine hip-hop referring to plums

or an Ashbery knockoff ascending

into the euphony of coherence.

What makes sense of anything that happens

behind locked doors is that which has no need

of a door, real or metaphorical,

to upset one’s cognitive apple cart.

Say, the slightest breeze beneath a doorjamb.

Their throat is an open grave.

Psalm 5:9

Moto at Broadway and Hewes

Brooklyn, NYC

Whatsoever is vulgar—sub-

standard housing, most packaged goods,

souls lacking virtuous aspiration,

anything ignoble or half-assed—will,

when the splendor appears, be swept up,

collected like so much rubbish, burned.

Imagine earth’s spirit clarified,

the good body set free from corruption.

Until then, there is music

for voice and double bass in cafés

where—think temples of refuge—

fugitive hope may find sanctuary.

When the splendor appears, who

will not see it? Whose knee will not bow?

My bones are in agony.

Psalm 6:2

Desire

I want to live

where no one lies

to the suffering child who asks

How long?

Deceive a child

and she dies a little—

a little death, a little death

then gone.

He who is pregnant with evil gives birth to disillusionment.

Psalm 7:14

Narcissus 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, wrote truly:

that line about Christ being the only

just critic. I write because it takes little

to spark my rage, and Saint Paul said we must

toil with our hands for the end of anger

is murder, and if any would be saved,

they must, with fear and trembling, work it out.

I will sing to the Lord, for he has been good to me.

Psalm 13:6

Among Luminous Things

In this ocean of ordinary light,

we are reef dwellers. Whether brain coral

or parrot fish or moray, we all do

our bit, then die. The ocean teems entire,

a whole we believe by faith, wrestling

with the darkness and sorrow in our hearts.

I will never regard as wise the fool

who would have me slap a muzzle on

the voice within, small and still, inspiring

praise of whoever it may be who holds

all this in brilliant fullness. I say

let fly with adoration, thanks, and more,

for if this is not the deeper reason

we are here, then there is no reason.

God is present.

Psalm 14:5

Shortsighted

for Bill, believer and photographer

You shoot the glorious—a crimson leaf

clinging to a bare branch, a snow-gray sky—

yet hanker for glory, that pure essence

of the uncreated Father of lights.

Though not one to say there is no God,

I am stuck on the quip about the bird

in hand being better than any two

that may be futzing about in the bush.

No doubt heaven’s great, but this here’s amazing.

Go ahead, call me shortsighted. It’s true:

I’m happy camping in light’s gallery

and praising the hard, full-spectrum effects

of here—now—ahead of me, a red fox

on the pond trail taking her own sweet time.

Lord, who may dwell in your sanctuary?

Psalm 15:1

Eucharist

Never have I felt a natural draw

to work anywhere close to an altar,

though, with this loose pile of sticks laid neatly

on a bare patch of earth, the ambition

to live quietly, minding my business,

becomes oblation, an ordinary

work of hands in service to grace. No priest

required, no victim, knife, or temple tax.

To this ground may a sweet, heavenly fire

descend. Here, where air sickens with the stench

of war and the perfunctory smoke

of religious ceremony, I turn—

keep us safe, O Lord our God—

to collect windfall for the coming night.

The sorrows of those will increase who run after other gods.

Psalm 16:4

Rush Hour

I saw troops patrolling Grand Central,

teams of police boarding trains to

and from the universe. In the name of

Code Orange we station gun-bearers

wherever, whenever we feel exposed.

On the train ride out, I draw attention

to a piece of luggage by itself.

The porter assured me the owner

asked to put it there, but I worry

the foreign-born porter was lying.

Is no one, nowhere safe? Hours later

turning onto campus, I wave to Sarge

in his pickup keeping watch by night.

Not even the faithful. . .

As for the deeds of men—

Psalm 17:4

She Said

Let the Spirit write the poems through you.

Yet the Spirit I know works in us as we

work on things like love—putting out the trash

without having to be reminded—which

I am very far from getting right. Poems

may serve love, but it would not be God’s way

to bypass our humanity to make

texts pleasing to him. Otherwise they might

emerge in meadows like rocks urged up through

topsoil by freeze and thaw. To hell with poems.

What matters: some help with love, for we who

frame laws and build flimsy arguments

resist at every turn the Spirit’s work

and shut our hearts against the gentle friend.

He brought me out into a spacious place.

Psalm 18:19

Seth’s Pond, West Tisbury

All things hold together. Colossians 1:17

Two lady’s-slippers up along the path,

a kingfisher, the indifferent moon

still hanging in a brilliant, mid-spring sky,

my son in a sweater in a rowboat—

thank you. I choose to believe

the universe not merely big, but chock-full

with presence. Yet may the pessimist be

right about us—pitiable flecks of dust?

With terror in the air, the NBA

shifting into All-Star mode, and ninety

e-mails to clear by Monday, what is true?

(Why, O my soul, do you prattle on thus?)

A tall reed gives slightly in the cool breeze,

nearly buckles when a redwing alights.

Their voice goes out into all the earth.

Psalm 19:4

So

If all created things speak wordlessly

of their creator—a turkey’s wattle?—

then what do tax loopholes say about us?

Or bombed-out cities? The gossip of blue

highways—quaint, inaudible buzz—is it

praise or lamentation? Could even these

restless streams make glad the heart of God?

Old Madeline (Wind in the Door) L’Engle

says all true art, looking death in the face

and rising into light, feeds “the River.”

O, to be able to hear, unfiltered,

the riotous vertical tongues of trees

and see beneath their cowled humility

the fire that burns yet will not consume them.

May the Lord send help from Zion.

Psalm 20:1–2

Answer Me

Bill’s a friend, homeowner, married man—says

their small lakeside place has begun to feel

too much for them—can’t seem to keep up with

what’s breaking down—and back on campus

“well done” has become a moving target

he quit trying to hit months ago. No

surprise his wish to remain here has quit

on him—Donna starts round eight of chemo

next week. This morning my wife surprised me:

“If Bill decides to leave, we should leave, too.”

What’s left to keep us staying anywhere

when, despite faith, hope, love, we keep losing

ground to discouragement, the suspicion

that no amount of work will ever be enough?

Root out their seed from among the children of men.

Psalm 21:10

Shock and Awe

Little words build, become fighting words,

and before you know it, some enemy

has us believing our cause is righteous.

Which is when our poets, like prophets

or sorely agitated roosters, take

courage and launch preemptory psalms,

smart bombs aimed at the heads of the wicked.

Pretty ugly stuff.

Today, as I prayed

in a local wildlife sanctuary,

two kestrels rose from the meadow, hovered

like the Spirit above the primal sea,

and clarified my way forward. Holding

to beauty, I must leave the rest to others

who may not hear the word of April wings.

I am a worm and not a man.

Psalm 22:6

In Fact

Show me an absolutely placid mind,

and I’ll show you a corpse or one as good

as dead: one in denial of the swill—

the lies of desire—I keep falling for.

Try as we may, we cannot lift ourselves

from ourselves rabbit-from-hat-like and live

to tell of it, though liars make bundles

claiming otherwise. We are a mess, yet

it pleases Him—and let us quit whining

about the gender of divinity—

to be numbered among the conflicted.

So here, among yappy dogs, snorting bulls,

bone-thin cows, let us offer God our praise:

Damn, you’re beautiful; and your handiwork.

The Lord is my shepherd.

Psalm 23:1

23

Roger loathes being likened to a sheep,

struggles with self-esteem, takes the figure

as an affront to his intelligence.

Arlys loves Roger, so when the preacher

went on for twenty minutes about sheep,

the Shepherd, and the sheep pen, Arlys winced

and prayed for Roger. Prayed he would not want

to walk home alone, cancel their outing

to the state park, return to the city.

Arlys loves God, believes Roger’s doubting

could be turned to confidence overnight.

If only he would hear the Shepherd’s voice,

she would sleep beside him in the fold, lack

nothing, anoint his head with oil.

Lift up your heads, O you gates; be lifted up, you ancient doors.

Psalm 24:7

Crossing the Williamsburg Bridge

Easter morning

Walt Whitman’s Brooklyn behind us, we are walking

to Manhattan and a late brunch in Chinatown:

steamed dumplings, rooster sauce, pan-fried sesame bread,

plastic bowls of spicy mushroom soup, oolong tea.

We walk above traffic, the river; beside the JMZ line,

share elevated pedestrian lanes with cyclists, Hassidim,

speed walkers, hippies, Latinos, arty types in all black.

You are here—a mantra learned from maps on kiosks

in suburban malls—plays in my head, and softly (to myself)

I offer up an Easter hymn under Jerusalem-blue skies.

All families will bow before him; he is the King of glory.

To the south, a thin column of cloud rises like altar smoke.

The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.

In this light, even the jaded skyline stands transfigured.

He instructs sinners in his ways.

Psalm 25:8

With Bill At Bafflin Sanctuary

We walk woodland trails cut by volunteers

and kid about total depravity

which, pertaining to salvation, translates

even “the greatest geniuses are blind-

er than moles.” The path is soft underfoot,

the laurel late-blooming. Beside a pond

he unpacks his camera. Can a snapshot

reveal the affliction of our nature?

I take refuge under translucent leaves,

leave him to his patient compositions.

But what’s the point? His kind wife is dying,

and he has left the house to take pictures

of ferns uncurling. Do I hear myself?

Are they not—forgive me—portraits of her?

Test me, O Lord, and try me.

Psalm 26:2

General Confession

In each promise of faithfulness, traces

of countless betrayals: averted eyes,

a voice’s tremor. Like the air we breathe

or the glances we exchange with strangers

on strobe-lit dance floors, we test positive

for impurity. But do not expect

a list of lurid details in these lines;

I am neither Catholic nor Lowell nor Plath.

I am merely—how does the song go—“prone

to wander.” So have we any chance,

this side of heaven, at a constant heart?

Or even modest progress toward that end?

The word’s out: love covers a multitude

of sins. Is this the best we can hope for?

I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.

Psalm 27:13

To Self-Pity

What a force you are! Cyclonic, godlike,

irresistible as lust is irresistible, and thick

with generations of flung wreckage, blunt

as thugs. Who, coracled in mere feeling,

can stand against such compelling torque?

I confess: you are a familiar ride, a drug

of choice, a sluttish changeling, your blouse

half-unbuttoned, eyes fierce with loathing.

Where, in my soul’s fluid world, currents

meet, there, turning on the slightest axis

of an insecurity, you—siren vortex—

draw me into your sweet, insatiable self.

Old friend and nemesis, there, too, a Rock

of refuge may be found. To Him I cleave.

Be their shepherd and carry them forever.

Psalm 28:9

No Worries

for my tour guide at the interview

We take them as they come, ages twelve

to nineteen, dress them in blue blazers, and run

them ragged. We get away with it because

their parents worry, and the lawns are presidential.

If we do one thing well it is attending

to the millions of surfaces that present themselves

to a visitor’s eye at each turn along

the arcing, neatly bordered pathways. All this

beneath broad, heavy-leafed trees not native

to this corner of the state: copper beech,

ginkgo, weeping red maple. We are a world apart,

not entirely to ourselves, just safely to one side.

But it was not the brick dorms or landscaping,

the dress code or college list that drew me

twenty years ago to these lawns, this life decked

with adolescents. It was the canvas hammock

you said most visitors never see slung across

the stream—between two birches—behind the rink.

Fall and spring, you and your friends would go there

and one at a time climb into the heavy cotton, pull

the frayed sides up across your chests and swing,

companions pumping the ropes for you, and all the way

to the top you’d turn, face nothing but the water

beneath you, then over you’d go—again

and again—wrapped in the weathered chrysalis.

I cannot say exactly what it was about that

late April afternoon that won me over to the job,

but I will be ever grateful for the detour.

The God of glory thunders.

Psalm 29:3

Neighbor as Theologian

How can she talk about a “word from God”?

The weather, yes, or the fate of our hedge.

A snake or the shrinking odds of her spouse

beating cancer, sure. But a word from God?

As though God were an actual person,

albeit incomprehensibly vast.

Yet this is how she talks, the way I talk

about my son from whom I could never

hear too much or too often, who’s only

hours away in Brooklyn. Why, unless

my sin were envy, would I begrudge her

an assurance of contact? More likely,

I long for what she has, embarrassed, pained

by my lack of openness to mystery—

which, she has told me, is wholly present

in, with, and under the hedge between us.

When you hid your face, I was dismayed.

Psalm 30:7

As It Is

The face of God is hidden from me.

I see only old walls, the clutter

of familiar rooms, shelves of books, snapshots,

mix-and-match decor. Awake or asleep

and dreaming, no divine shook-foil glimmer

for my inmost eye. Rumors reach me

of others’ encounters—glimpses of His face—

but after devouring these, the want

remains. Is there some special training I need?

Last week a friend confided that for years

the Holy Ghost has shimmered inside her,

every moment beatific. My resolve:

to pretend my friend is not a liar

or schizophrenic—and to seek new friends.

He showed his wonderful love to me when I was in a besieged city.

Psalm 31:21

Putting a Name to the Face

In Madagascar or Peru, St. Kitts

or Tasmania, wherever children,

despite suffering, find games to play

or halt play to marvel at a column

of clouds collecting on some horizon;

wherever anyone takes care to make

ready a back room for a visitor—

sweep the floor for the ten-thousandth time,

place a fresh flower on the pillow—there

a glimpse, the face you know you know

in a crowd of strangers who disappears

before you get a fix on the distance

between you—

mercy!—

and that face.

Do not be like the horse or the mule which have no understanding.

Psalm 32:9

Brother Chronos

Radio-controlled and programmed to check

in every four hours with an atomic

device deep in some bunker in Denver,

my travel clock is more monk than truant

on probation, for it desires correction,

six times a day turns out toward the big

unseen—receives it—then turns back

to serving my fascination with time.

No trumpet sounds to signal the clock’s

connecting moment—a mute faithfulness

wholly independent of audience—

and I would be its disciple, pray the hours,

live contented, in step with the Spirit,

but my program is a prison named fear.

Still, how wonderful to know what time it is,

precise to within a millionth of a second.

From heaven the Lord looks down and sees all mankind.

Psalm 33:13

Report

I flavor my food with long suffering.

The clothes in my closet are unironed.

I have never spoken in another tongue.

Given the option, I would work alone

or in the tested company of friends.

I find nothing holy in national

holidays though love getting the hours

off, time being the skin I look forward

to shedding once I am done with my life.

Between Eden and the New Earth, only

wind, music, and diligence feel at all

familiar. Here, everywhere is exile.

I will continue to speak this language.

Every word, a stand against losing heart.

No one will be condemned who takes refuge in him.

Psalm 34:22

God

Are all theophobic? No one wants to

be reminded. No thought, sentence, or deed

can escape the chill of divine review.

Dread being a dark matter of the soul,

engines of suppression hum constantly

flooding the wakeful mind with distractions

grand as virtue, common as relatives.

(How else to prevent the unwanted Word’s

indelicate meaning from causing hurt?)

Judgment by one’s peers can be useful, but

keep at bay the cool scrutiny of God

lest “luv” lose its warm inclusivity,

“my truth” its fragile singularity.

No “truth,” though lovely, will be left standing

on the day Truth absolutely arrives.

Poor, middle class, rich; straight, gay—no one

questions the myth: autonomy, each one’s

rule a law. But those who fear the Lord and

seek Him lack nothing, their fear a spring-fed

tributary to perfect freedom where

unruly wills find rest in serving Him.

Voice-beyond-language (still, small, holy),

wickedness reveals itself resisting

(xenophobically) Thy sovereign wisdom.

Yesterday, today, tomorrow, folly’s

zero swallows her dreary children whole.

I will give thanks in the great assembly.

Psalm 35:18

Word Problem