Читать книгу Psalms for Skeptics - Kent Gramm - Страница 10

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.

“Half dead,” he’d say; “but 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.