Psalms
From the Author’s Note: I’ve always envied the psalms of intimacy and anguish, in which the bitter flux of human existence is inextricably interwoven with God’s loving, raging, transformational presence. In the lightning-shot space where Divine meets human, time shatters, splits, leaps like a river, and so does the soul of the speaker, now hunting God, now hunted, now languishing in despair, now reclining in quiet triumph against the pillars of Heaven. As I languished and triumphed my way through despairs of my own, I realized that I wanted, needed, to create a corollary to that psalm space, but a space narrowed, as my life had narrowed, to a single room in which God and I had no choice but to face each other. Angry, hopeless, desperately lonely, I thought of these psalms as a trap for the God who seemed to have left me behind, but as soon as I started to write them, I found God waiting for me inside.
God, it seems, had been waiting a long time
excerpt from the book
I:2
You scare me the way I scare the rabbit
In my path. I freeze,
Brown eye fixed on your approaching shadow.
Sometimes you rip me to shreds,
Sometimes squeeze
Till my ribs crack, always
You watch me bleed and blossom
Curiously, from a distance,
As though I were a furry blur of terror
Frozen between surrender
And the urge to disappear
Into the undergrowth
Of forever. You’ll scare me
To one death or another
If you come closer.
You come closer.
I smell you on my clothes, my books,
The toys my children scatter,
My two or three private parts
Devoted solely
To radiating pain, my organs
Of need and pleasure. Why do you bother
To provoke this terror
In something small and unimportant
That asks nothing
But to be allowed to vanish?
Why do you bother with us at all
When your being is bounded
By no conditions
But absolute freedom
And absolute distance
From the bits of bone and truth
That come closer and closer to freezing
The closer we come
To you?