PSALM
Praise be sun, praise be moon shivered shoregrass, channeled surf, pattern-cut glass.
Praise your feet at the seething shore, siphoned sand.
Praise delta churn and bracken strand.
Praise your stolen name, the state’s mistake, praise thundercloud and sun break.
Praise be earth, praise be sea.
Praise this sharpened edge, gutted night,
your arm plunged elbow-deep in the scripted water, all that it keeps.
*
Bless the unforeseen, bless this eroded life,
how water flowing past a rock slowly excavates the rock, slowly eviscerates the shoreline,
makes then unmakes these tidal tributaries,
this insecticide-laced channel your dog splashed along
six months before he died of lymphoma—Drainage Ditch #1 the map will tell you later.
Bless all hindsight, bless regrets.
Bless those meaningless paths you walked, thirsting towards home.
*
Beauty in nightfall, beauty in striated dawn,
in the detached wing of a crane left by the roadside, otherworldly storm of feathers orbiting like a halo—the Holy Spirit you were told, ablutions of light and gold leaf laid by Renaissance artisans.
Sacred light, divine wisdom, the spirit colors that flashed
as your brother’s arm crushed your carotid, as he squeezed until you convulsed and passed out, speaking in tongues while blood flowered in your brain.
Was that a kind of death? Or a kind of living at the periphery?
Was it a kind of love, the tightening headlock? A stain on the soul?
Beauty in, beauty out. What you consume becomes you.
Bless this beautiful bruise spreading just under the skin.
***
Author photograph courtesy of Rob Arnold
