a crack at my own psalm
Oh
LORD. Is this purgatory? Tell me. No... you don't
owe me that. You are more distant from me than the most disloyal
friend, yet you flow out of this pen; you emergeth from my lamp this
dark night; you project my own vision. You are throughout, yet
wrapping your justice in my skin. Not alone I am. My work flickers;
yours sets ice ablaze. Your end is a sloth's dream. Were you ever
curious? Did you ever self-deceive? You knew the measure of
creation's dark – did you tell no one? or did your apostate sneer
at your avow, and call you a guesser? For what? For what does the
most proud one seeketh the limit of ignorance? Ah. I see: He wanted
the void to prove his character – now he begs the blind to admire
him. He flirts the lost as a drunk comedian. And what a set he's
having, this very night with his yearling prey. How? I say. With a
clock? A whistle? God, a kiss? LORD, my fellows run! They careen and
bounce from a mangled wreck, and seek to spoil a virgin, or murder a
dandelion. Already dead, loving it, they cast not a shadow but by
their own hate. A moth itches them; it loveth light more than they.
They don a yoke and chains under the sun; they name the sun chairman.
Buffoons! They purchase filth with their stone words. The temple of
the father's tongue is abandoned. One upon another draw bows of
derision; to kill all truth as if you were not Truth. You catch their
arrows, of conceit and poison, with two fingers, every which-way they
shoot, and turn the missiles to plague. I smell it. I sweat it. I eat
it. But I will call you my Father and rest on the vine of green and
dew. May I breathe the eternity of a never-ending seventh chapter, a
praise and a swashbuckling and a howling chorus of the north, in the
deepest crack of the most brilliant dawn; a righteous adventure of
vision, sojourn and friendship of excellent wild. The ghettos will be
moss. The prisons will be mangroves. The towers of fear will be
chimneys for termites. Nature will seize nature. Order will seize
order. Law will seize law. Decay and vigor shall wed and be faithful.
May you preside; Amen. The conquest of the lie shall
complete itself in the thundering echoes of the Word, betraying the
bounds of zero to the devils who sought, and led captives, to steal
the worthless treasure within its pit. Glory will see no summit, and
no creature will fear the drop. Trust will be the palm of your hand.
Knowledge will be but love, and honour, and tales of the chivalrous
of the dust road. Crags of the Old World shall sunder up fountains of
wax under bonfires of pine; Creation shall dance free all around. And
the New shall imagine and remember the birth of the deep as a
grandfather tortoise. Rain shall find not a rebel on earth – war? a
joke. Weapons shall be verse. Honesty will be its own preacher, and
no child will despair of a home, nor a companion. Eyes will murder
teeth in the theatre. The kingdom will laugh, be filled, blessed and
rejoicing in sympathy, comforted in their exhilaration and tears of
mirth. No beauty will be denied. The massive and the dwarfish, the
vast and the dense, the king and the pawn and the games of
brotherhood will have their place in the Book. Villains will be
funny; heroes wily. Art shall assault with color or nothing.
Fantasies shall have no fear in them and not one barrier. Ballads
will be contemplative like unto silence in winter. Observance and
pace on a walk will find balance. Bold will not offend; happy shall
wander. Math shall be everything superficial. Surprise shall be
history; anticipation shall be the science. Christ was the journeyman
to my heart becoming; so was he ever: May He clue what he discovered,
and command my mystery. Your grace be with me. Amen.
Giambattista Tiepolo [1696-1770]
SHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEIt
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