Scott Cairns - Idiot Psalms: New Poems

IDIOT PSALMS 2014 First printing Idiot Psalms: New Poems Copyright 2014 by Scott Cairns ISBN 978-1-61261-515-8 The Paraclete Press name and logo (dove on cross) are trademarks of Paraclete Press, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cairns, Scott. Idiot Psalms : New Poems / Scott Cairns. pages cm ISBN 978-1-61261-515-8 (pbk.) I. Title. PS3553.A3943A6 2014 811'.54dc23 2013037323 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in an electronic retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Paraclete Press Brewster, Massachusetts www.paracletepress.com Printed in the United States of America IDIOT PSALMS New Poems SCOTT CAIRNS PARACLETE PRESS BREWSTER, MASSACHUSETTS Acknowledgments ARCHAEOPTERYX Somnambulant Long Habit ASCENT Wintertime Agora: Salonika Late Incarnation BLACKBIRD Irreducible Is What Im After BLUESTEM Idiot Psalm 11, published asYet Another Idiot Psalm CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE Idiot Psalm 4, published asAnother Idiot Psalm COMMENT Annunciation Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration:Orthodox Christian Perspectives onEnvironment,Nature, and Creation (anthology) The Fragile Surround IMAGE: ART FAITH MYSTERY Speculation: Along the Way Nothing Articulation Idiot Psalm 9, published asAnother Idiot Psalm: We Say Flight Idiot Psalm 7, published asAnother Idiot Psalm: And Yea Lenten Complaint And Yet Another Page and Yet Hesychasterion POETRY Idiot Psalm 1, 2, 3, 12, & 13, published as Idiot Psalms Eremite Another Road Home First Storm and Thereafter Draw Near Dawn at Saint Annas Skete PRAIRIE SCHOONER Eratos Instruction Parable Threnody PLUME Aspect RELIEF: A QUARTERLY CHRISTIAN EXPRESSION EROTIKOS LOGOS And Why Theology? Two Trees RUMINATE Kol Nidre SPIRITUALITY & HEALTH Approaching the Holy Mountain SPIRITUS Idiot Psalm 14, published asIdiot Psalm: With Fear TAOS JOURNAL OF POETRY AND ART When I Say I Ache for You To Say Silence THE MODERN REVIEW Late Habit, published asLate Habits, Attendant Assurances Ode: Erotic Word Heavenly City (Ouranoupoli) Ex Oriente Lux VINEYARDS Pure Enough Mystagogia Contents IDIOT PSALMS High Plane As a field of snow, as a field of Arctic ice, the clouds below attain, appear to frame, an endless span of white, of textured white addressed by shades of blue, by varied shades of what is very nearly blue infused clean into the very clouds, into their white. What firmament is this? What waters? What manner of divide? Close your mouth, and open up the stingy air-vent overhead. Take your whiskey neat, or with a single chip of ice. Have some nuts. The sun is slipping to the west, and we rush east, toward night.

Our flight is sure to meet the sun some distance hence, and we are sure to take that puzzlement and all adjacent puzzlements in stride. Meantime, do have another sip, and savor this odd margin merging both our waters, merging what might prove this night to be the minds late opening occasion. I.UNAWARESone must first beginby not understanding many things!Prince Myshkin, from The Idiot Parable To what might this slow puzzle be compared? The rabbi is perplexed. That said, please bear in mind the rabbi has a taste for fraught perplexities. Comparisons have long obtained for those enamored of the word a measure of requital, have tenderedjust here, for instancea momentary take, a likely likening, not to be unduly honored as anything, well, conclusive, but categorically toward. Still, I love these textures on the tongue, and love the way their taste and feel so often serve to spin the body and the mind into one vertiginous assemblage.

And so, one asks, to what slight figure might The Vast and Inexplicable compare? A mist that penetrates the bone? The looming sea? The all but endless and unyielding green expanse above? Or, say, the laden word whose compass and whose burdens turn a multitude of keen articulations, full none of which quite seems to satisfy. Threnody The dream is recurrent, and yes the dream can leave me weeping, waking with a start, confused, and pressing my wet face hard into the pillow. That is to say the dream is very bitter. The scenes are various, the gist unchanging: my father returns, and we all are at once elated that his death was apparently an error, that he had simply been away, a visit to the shore. Then, increasingly, I grow uneasy about how deeply he has changed. He is both frail and distracted (or it could be that he withholds some matter habiting his mind), and none of us dares speak, neither of his death nor of his sudden, startling return.

We share other confusions as well: He has arrived in the camper truck he drove when I was a boy, but my wife and children are also here to greet him, even my son, whom he has never met. Often, in the dream, I am the one who first suspects he cannot stay. I am the one who sees but cannot say his visit will be brief. And just as I suspected, as I feared, I wake. Irreducible is what Im after, which is why I cannot mind so much observing how words are more precise or less precise, but they are not exact. No. No.

And yes, each proves solicitous and pleasant on the tongue, and more than a little tolerant of ones most earnest yammering; still, the promise of each word abides within its endless, inarticulate expanse, thank God. The dancing figures of the utterance forever spin their circles; they forever turn upon the sawdust littered floor. And even as I speak I see my good intentions leaping clean beyond my reach, and each for its duration lifts the stillness into trouble. For its bright moment, each obtains for each a little taste of what lit distance one might entertain, thus irreducible. A Word She said God. He seems to be therewhen I call on Him but callinghas been difficult too.

Painful. And as she quieted to find another word, I was delivered once more to my own long grappling with that very angel herestill hereat the base of the ancient ladder of ascent, in foul dust languishing yet at the very bottom rung, letting go my grip long before the blessing. for Aliki Barnstone Idiot Psalm 1 a psalm of Isaak, accompanied by Jews harp O God Belovd if obliquely so, dimly apprehended in the midst of this, the fraught obscuring fog of my insufficiently capacious ken, Ostensible Lover of our kindwhile apparently aloofallow that I might glimpse once more Your shadow in the land, avail for me, a second time, the sense of dire Presence in the pulsing hollow near the heart. Once more, O Lord, from Your Enormity incline your Face to shine upon Your servant, shy of immolation, if You will. First Storm and Thereafter What I notice first within this rough scene fixed in memory is the rare quality of its lightning, as if those bolts were clipped from a comic book, pasted on low cloud, or fashioned with cardboard, daubed with gilt, then hung overhead on wire and fine hooks. What I hear most clearly within that thunder now is its griefa moan, one long lament echoing, an ache. And the rain? Raucous enough, pounding, but oddly musical, and, well, eager to entertain, solicitous.

No storm since has been framed with such matter-of-fact artifice, nor to such comic effect. No, the thousand-plus storms since then have turned increasingly artless, arbitrary, bearingevery one of thema numbing burst. Another Road Home