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Joy Ladin - Psalms

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Book:
Psalms
Author:
Joy Ladin
Publisher:
Wipf and Stock Publishers
Genre:
Books / Religion
Year:
2010
Rating:
4 / 5
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These psalms grow out of a decades-long fascination with the biblical psalms, particularly the Davidic psalms, which portray the tempestuous, sometimes awful intimacy of the Divine-human relationship. In the lightning-shot Psalm-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 Heavens. These contemporary psalms attempt to create a corollary to that biblical psalm space, a space narrowed to a single room in which God and the speaker have no choice but to face and struggle toward one another through the whirlwind of pain and love.

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Psalms

Joy Ladin

I make my bed in hell, and you are there... Psalm 139

... in the secret place... Psalm 91

III

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401. Resource Publications An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3 Eugene, OR 97401 isbn 13: 978-1-60899-349-9 eisbn 13: 978-1-4982-7264-3 For every you in whom I have seen You God is making me now.

Nasia Benvenuto Ladin, 2009

Acknowledgement

Psalm III:6, Youre lost in me again, appeared in Lilith

Theres nothing here Thats not your fault, not bees Enslavement to nectars labyrinths, Not the cacophonous greens Shaking themselves out like tangled hair, not The sinking shiver of my blood Or the phantom footsteps of disease That haunt my spinal column Searching for bits of self to seize The way you seize on bits of self You somehow lost In me, not the terror Stirring my depths Like the sea monsters you created When you were in the creation business, Not the bombs Your children strap on To detonate in streets crowded With children you seem, in a flash, To have forgotten. No, I cant Not blame you For a single second Of the light That penetrates me non-consensually Dawn after dawn, impregnating With hope, desire, need A body that couldnt care less How far away you seem Even when you are oppressively close, Stuffing my nostrils With blossoming breath, Drowned hair dripping Over my breasts, Dripping fragrance, dripping smoke, Dripping your most Corrosive acid, Possibility.

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. Youll 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?

The footsteps of the Lord In the garden. I know The drill: I pull on my skin And try to act human, Knowing youve already noticed The difference between the creature I am And the creature you thought You were breathing yourself into On the sixth day, at evening. I know You will clothe my nakedness, tender But also disappointed That I need to feel something Other than naked When nakedness is the image In which I was created, the image I see through your see-through robe Of shy young stars That sing very quietly So as not to drown Your image singing inside them. You want me to see you Picking your way Through the garden of my body.

You try so hard To be seen. I try so hard not to be One of your hopes Staring hungrily through the leaves. I talk to you incessantly But you can count on the fingers Of the hand you dont have The times Ive heard you answer. Occasionally Im blinded By your beauty. One blink And the reassuring Lids of life Close over you again.

You want it both ways, to be the sun And the clouds that smother it, the heart And the heart that breaks it, meaningless suffering And the truth That redeems it.

Nice work If you can get it But you wont get it From me. You offer yourself Like an apple reddening Within my reach, dangling On the lowest branch, a generous Hermeneutical fragrance Drenching every event, trivial and tragic, In eau d significance . After all, What choice do I have? Your angels Torched the trees Of life and knowledge, Although Ive made a decent living Battening On their ashes. You too Have a taste for ashes. Of ash. Of something Burned a long time ago And still burning Somewhere close to my mouth, the smoke of you Clogging my nostrils, A cry for help Ive become too bored To notice.

You woo me with the fruit Of your intimacy, infinity thick As star-sparked honey, fine-toothed combs Of forgiveness, the barely-remembered Coo of a mother Singing me to sleep on her shoulder, My first bicycle, the welling sun-warmed Strawberry juice Of forever. You wash the dying Off my hands And stand there With an indecipherable expression As I die again. No wonder I cant stand you. No wonder I crave your presence, apple blazing In the blazing crotch Of historys burning branches.

Yes, its true, Ive lost The world you gave me, The blue and luminous world, Round as a marble, In which, if I squinted, I could always see you Shimmering in slow oxbows, Mirroring the rivers Mallard iridescence, sketching your face In castellated clouds And sidewalk cracks And the twitchy industry of ants Insatiable hunger to scour Your every cleft and crevice.

You dont want me To forgive you.

You dread the thought That I might photosynthesize The obsidian sunlight Radiating from your skin. You cant bear What might blossom From the sickness-seeds you sowed In the soil of my flesh, Blackened shoots, like something charred By forgiveness, the forgiveness You cant bear The earth of me to bear When nothing made of earth Is made to photosynthesize The terrible spectrum of death and life You radiate from your skin. You try to turn From the shoots growing toward you From the holes you opened In the earth of this flesh That receives your touch As something that hurts And hurts too much To do anything But forgive.

Joy comes in the morning You say, as though you expect me To believe you. You Come in the morning, Its morning and instead of joy You come, and you expect And I expect And neither of us believes Were anywhere close To joy this morning. Even joy Doesnt believe We will ever come To expect her.

Every morning Without joy you come To tell me to expect What doesnt, mourning with me every morning As though you expect me To start believing Joy comes in the morning Because every morning, Unexpected and mourning, You come.

So here we are, alone at last, With only loneliness Between us, roses of loneliness choking Exhausted trellises Of limbs and metaphysics, the overpowering Fragrance of loneliness Overpowering my resistance To the slowly opening rose Of your infinitely loving Indifferenceyou call it holiness As you climb the tiny Wounded trellis Of my humanness.

Yes, I hear the question In your voice, your voice In the question that wrenches My stars of pain Into constellations, twins and serpents And a woman who has no face Staring in a mirror At the emptiness Between them. Yes, emptiness Is my answer to your question, A small, swept space That neither storms nor aches, a little orphaned mouth Whose lips are made of silence. Yes, I understand Your silence in the face of a woman You cannot face Because you have erased her Attempts to find some shape, Some constellation, In your glimmering syllables of pain That seem to ask her Nothing. Yes, I know that nothing Is the only voice In which you can speak without shattering, Though as you can see Something in me has already shattered, Some piece of body in my soul, some Metaphysical window That kept you out Or kept me in Or kept up the distinction Between your nearness beating Like a heart And the excruciating sky Of your absence.

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