Читать книгу Psalms for the Poor - Kent Gramm - Страница 5

the law of the Lord

1

This is the Law. The Law is everything:

a sad man cherishing a slice of pumpkin

pie, a wife of dreamy cream beside him

snowy white and fluffed, the winter sun dim

through the coffee shop window, many voices

moaning round of romance. This is a race

of rock-loving farmers and brooding, pacing

kings, cancer in the genes. There are no choices.

Glaciers melt in Odysseus’s face;

Athena looks around and packs it in,

reports to God that everything done brings

unintended consequences. “There’s grace,”

God says with a sly everlasting grin.

The memory of love checks her watch, sings.

2

But I was saying, everything is Law—

the brooks, stones, companionship, suffering.

How does a constellation wheel? Its spring

is in the numbers dribbling along awe

like jewelly bread crumbs. It’s all in numbers,

all of it, right down to the ants. And chance

is covered too, explainable to parents

on a planet circling Arcturus—blurs

in our best telescopes but intelligent.

Nothing is, that is not the Law. Always

two plus two is four; passion is always

red, purity blue, Son of God argent;

I will always remember you. I sit

with the sun going down, and this is it.

3

Can it be written in a book, the Law?

Some book, with pages like accordions,

print vigorous as spermatozoa,

punctuation bright as a million suns,

an index hot and right as algebra—

its states like H2O a trinity

transforming on the page, liquid fiction

crystallizing with a sheen: history

now, nonfiction, suffering and death—“one

damn thing after another”—how it bleeds

its ink! And then, the last chapter a gas,

white-winged horses farther than eye can see

converge to Brahman minuscule and vast,

a Way that rises into poetry.

He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water,

that bringeth forth his fruit in his season.

Unless I touch his hand and lay my fingers

to his healing side I’ll say he’s a ghost,

like King Saul or Auntie Maud—in the clothes

of my low brain, that will see anything

I want to see. But my hand is something

else—it won’t lie to me, it won’t believe;

it was this that plucked the fruit off the tree

in the Garden and it knows everything

and nothing. You will call me The Doubter.

I will believe only what I can feel

and nothing I am told. Words are nothing,

but when I feel His hand like living water

I will draw it to me like a willow tree

and I will believe; so all in its season.