Psalm 45 Publications

Riding four wheelers after dark in springtime
May be one of the prairie’s purest pleasures.
Wednesday night we were buzzing down a two-track,
Mish, my son, holding to the rack behind me,
Ariel in the green glow of the dash light,
carving up all the mud and melting snow drifts.

Soon, we stopped at a stark shell of a farm house.
Both the kids asked if we could go and see it,
so, with flashlight in hand, we crossed the threshold.
Thirty years, at the least, it sat there empty;
still, when Mish flipped the switch and nothing happened,
he was wondering why the lights weren’t working.

Ariel thought that we should only whisper
since the people who lived there must be sleeping.
What could she have been sensing that I didn’t?
Back then, under the stars my son loves counting,
through the slough that my daughter says smells funny,
toward the home where my wife was waiting for us:
how I wanted to put time in a bottle!

Why do you give your body to be torn,
when God, your Father, raised it from the dead?
They maimed and marred it once; but, as you said,
you made those nail holes, blemishes of thorn,
and gash of spear all medals to adorn
that sacred frame. In streams of wine you bled,
and made the flesh they broke our heavenly bread;
then to eternal joy you were reborn.

Now we wield scourges, we who are your own;
with teeth as sharp as spears we bite and rend;
but we are your risen body, you alone
our universal head – so put an end
to this sad second piercing of your heart!
Restore your members who are torn apart.

They are just empty thoughts without a name
that run down like the raindrops on a glass
till drops are streams and streams a swirling sheet
that does not cleanse but turns the clear opaque.

They are old smells of must and cedarwood
that call to mind a child’s most treasured things,
now lost and rotting in some reclaimed pit;
they rise like fumes to stupefy the heart.

Pale shadows of my former selves, they come
to laugh at me with words I can’t make out.
Too weak to walk the broken avenues
where they carouse, I watch them listlessly.

They stifle me like weightless plumes of sorrow.
How have my empty thoughts become so heavy?

Come, make your dwelling in my humble heart:
although the outside is a hut of clay,
inside eons compact into a day
and there’s a universe in every part,
but without form and void, lacking the art
that spoke the worlds into divine array.
You breathed in life; I breathed out the decay
that undid what was well done at the start,
and made myself unfit to be your home.
You could have passed the sentence even then,
but stooped instead to indwell a virgin’s womb;
stoop further now, to the dark home within,
where dust and disrepair dwell till you come
set my flawed house in order once again. Continue Reading

The world is choked on verbiage. We have sown
blind bias. Like a thistle gone to seed,
our ignorance has flowered and the weed
of self-inflating punditry has blown
its blighted spawn worldwide. The numbing drone
of everyman has drowned the impassioned creed
thundered in smoke by an uncommon breed
who fed on flame. Too much has been my own.

I seek a word to hang the heavens higher
and shake the lower powers from their nest.
Then would I draw my soul into my chest,
ignite my lungs, in one last gasp expire,
knowing that breath bore darts of rain and fire
to burn a renascence. Till then I rest.

She meets the truth in bloodshot eyes
twice-mirrored in a soiled pane
with rusty cracks like her failed tries
that broke and bled, and sees it’s vain
to hope that life could be made right,
once shattered; stifled memories
seep from her mind’s dark cavities
till saltier seeping blurs her sight. Continue Reading

There is a tumbled order in these things:
flung mountain chains,
ice-bouldered plains,
incorporate exhaustless mirrorings.

The veins in every leaf split off sequentially
by the same ratios
as the whole forest grows,
leaves, branches, trees expanding exponentially. Continue Reading

July, 1996

At first I thought, “If I can push away,
   swim underwater for a stroke or two,
then surface where it’s calm, I’ll be okay” –
   but If is easier to think than do. Continue Reading

We rode, one summer afternoon last year,
through waving wheat fields; three of us had come
and it was perfect, hot sun and cold beer,
except my horse kept edging back for home, Continue Reading

“No, no, it’s so hot I can’t get my nose in it!”
(A moment earlier, it was barely warm.)
Choice irony! Well, I might not have chosen it,
but God’s gifts take an unexpected form.

When she said it, those eyes in their shrunken hollows
blazed hotter than her fresh-died mane of fire,
like when you flip a switch and brightness follows,
or rest a live coal on an upright wire.

It was no lie; I can’t say she was caught in it:
she ardently believed both contrarieties.
No sooner had she said than she’d forgotten it,
and such straightforwardness can put a guy at ease.

“Do what you love,” they say, and so I’m doing it.
What color’s found in an Alzheimer’s unit!

A Translation of De Luscinia, by Alcuin

Lost nightingale! what hand tore you from me,
moved by a jealous impulse at my gain?
Your healing music soothed my soulful pain;
Your sweet, sad song, my heart’s own poetry,
is vanished now. May your winged neighbors be
gathered at once to mourn a crime so vain!
Let them raise with me a Pierian strain,
lament those lost notes of glad variety,

flung strangely from a throat so thin and gray.
Your mouth was filled with your Creator’s praise,
and hateful darkness could not make you stay
from song, fair gem of heaven’s own woven rays.
No wonder burning seraphs fill their days
with laud: you did as much in your own way. Continue Reading

The cool moist of the earth upon my back,
the smell of fresh-cut clover, and the way
the cottonwood-twig tracery seems to crack
the sky into sapphire fragments join to say,
“Come back to another lawn, another day,
another cottonwood tracery’s tangled track!”
I’d love to heed their call,
but childhood’s mysteries are sealed forever:
Spring turns to Summer, Summer turns to Fall,
and time sweeps onward like a rushing river
whose droplets’ gleaming is ephemeral. Continue Reading

At six, as usual, he rose.
He ran his fingers through his hair,
stretched once or twice, threw on some clothes,
then turned and stumbled down the stair.
Who could divine what he would do
from untouched eggs – in a full plate
an empty chair anticipate?

      No one knew. No one knew. Continue Reading

England! when first I saw your happy shore,
My heart leapt backward to a gallant time
And blent with many a master of brave rhyme,
Well-loved by me from childhood, whom you bore,
So I loved you also – Milton in high pow’r,
Tennyson brooding, sensuous pale Keats,
Dark Byron, soaring Shelley, whose sad sweets
Moved me so oft to tears. But when once more

I mused on them who not just pricked my soul
But set aflame my spirit, whose lifeblood
Was seed springing up in harvest fields chock-full –
Bunyan, Sibbes, Owen, Brooks – men grave and good –
My giddy heart grew mute and sorrowful
And weeping glad thanks in Bunhill Fields I stood.

We slept and rose and played awhile and slept;
   Every new dawn came golden as before,
   And every eve the same calm aspect wore;
   But the long shadows close and closer crept,
And if we had understood, we would have wept
    To know such shadows, like black worms, have pow’r
   To eat summer’s flesh, and leave the bitter core:
   For summer’s coin is borrowed, never kept.

Now winter’s here, on old bones we must gnaw,
   From which the marrow’s been already sucked,
   And beauty-starved, gaze on the twisted claw
   Of that old bush from which the flowers are plucked –
   Sweets we forgot to prize! but even so,
   I think that it was better not to know.

The storm came howling down on us tonight
   And raved and swore she’d leave the whole world dead,
   But I gave little heed to what she said
   Because I knew her darts of frosty white
Were only by a half-degree not quite
   The softer pelt of rain – and what of dread
   Can lurk in what tomorrow will have fled?
   And so I knew she sputtered out of spite.

I knew it and she knew I knew, so why
   Did she become more eager to convince
    Us both of what we both knew was a lie,
   And hide behind a white-washed circumstance?
   Did she only mean to mock my kindred rants
   Or of my winter’s end to prophesy?

   Who has sorrow? Who has woe?
Whose complaints cease not to flow?
Who has eyes dim-glazed and red,
And purple bruises on his head?
– He who tarries at the wine
And never leaves its flowings fine,
Till he’s waxen gross and dull,
And flaccid’s grown from crown to sole. Continue Reading

The day is old, the day is pale and wan,
   And blurs around the edges, where the hoar,
      Fast-springing from the temples of the East,
Shows the swift senescence of youthful Dawn;
   Red Morn first woke to calm; and now once more
      Grey Evening finds the tranquil time of rest:
So peace through frenzy unto peace does creep,
Leading us to your pleasant bowers, O Sleep. Continue Reading

I.

Like the first half-light promise of the Dawn
When deep as death has been the reign of Night;
Like golden raylets dropping from the Sun

To wash the gloom-stained world in happy Light;
Like sudden hum of near-forgotten song;
Like all things fair and good and glad and right

When they put to flight things sad and dull and wrong;
Like a deep sigh when a weary task is done;
Come, whirl, golden Laughter! our dull-grey lives among. Continue Reading

Who has sorrow? Who has woe?
Let the sparkling vintage flow!
Drown the cares that strain and stress
In waves of glad forgetfulness,
Roll’d forth from the foam-flecked mouth
That’s spoke an end to many a drouth –
Even yours, O flagon, beaker, vat,
Whate’er you be where the nectar’s at,
Darling of the gladsome vine:
Hail to thee, ever-flowing wine! Continue Reading

A-wing in the azure-lands bright,
                Hung trembling aloft,
With a wingbeat erratic and light
                And a feather-form soft,
                                Oh! how oft
Have you heavenward turned my dim, earth-sullied sight. Continue Reading

Why do the fairest fall? O heart, O heart!
   How often must you sigh at senseless pain?
What blows break others, and you feel the smart?
   Why bleed you from another’s opened vein?
   If you could pour in torrents forth a rain
Of your own life in some sad spot apart,
                And leave this tear-dimmed vale,
Where only the guiltless suffer, and where rage
   The heathen throngs and prosper, it were well.
But to be senseless for many a cruel age
   Were better than to thrive where sweetlings fail. Continue Reading

Away, away! all you who stand erect,
And you who lift your forehead to the clouds;
And all who are with golden rings bedecked,
And in fine linens wrapped, as white as shrouds;
And you who healthy are, and wise, and strong,
Who have full-stuffed with minted coin your purse,
You are not welcome here, howe’er so long
You thumb your ros’ry or bejewel your hearse;
Get hence! your fond excesses all are wrong,
Your feigned good deeds and penances are worse.
Feigned-free, you ‘re slaves; feigned-blest, you are a curse. Continue Reading

I know what it is to hurt deeply;
I feel more than I can say;
The bill always rings up too steeply
On payment day. Continue Reading

Light of true Light! whose winsome ray
Earthward descends from bright
And never-ending heaven’s day
In grace, – true Light of Light! Continue Reading