Psalms. Joy Ladin
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Psalms
Joy Ladin
Psalms
Copyright © 2010 Joy Ladin. 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, “You’re lost in me again,” appeared in Lilith
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.
Biblical Hebrew has no upper- or lower-case, no “thee” or “thou” or other dignifying signifiers to elevate the “you” of God above the human “you.” Because ours is a culture that assumes God’s distance as reflexively as the Hebrew psalmists assumed God’s presence, I have broken with the English and American tradition of capitalizing the Divine “You” and followed the Hebrew convention. Since I capitalize the human “I,” this reverses the usual typographical relationship between Divine and human. There are similar relational somersaults throughout the poems. In this too I’m following the Hebrew psalms, in which the tempestuous relationship between soul and God is figured as a whirlwind of pain and love.
Joy Ladin
Amherst, Massachusetts
December 2009
I
I make my bed in hell, and you are there . . .
Psalm 139
1
There’s nothing here
That’s not your fault, not bees’
Enslavement to nectar’s 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 can’t
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 couldn’t 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.
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?
3
The footsteps of the Lord
In the garden. I know
The drill: I pull on my skin
And try to act human,
Knowing