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and fair,

      and righteous to a fault;

      He is a god when he’s up there,

      presiding over all.

      Down here he/she’s another thing—

      invisible as salt

      in use, more intimate than sin;

      if found, then found at fault.

      A lord almighty’s dignity

      requires the proper place—

      a mausoleum in the sky,

      not someone’s beat-up face.

      A deity conceived is free

      to be, to will, to do—

      not troubled by contingency,

      not breathing next to you.

      Psalm 8

      When I consider thy heavens . . .

      Thy heavens frighten me, to tell the truth.

      This little Earth’s speed is a constant shock;

      you’d think our air would fall off like a sack.

      And then where do you go to take a breath?—

      the next atmosphere is light years away

      and it’s a soup of half-frozen methane.

      But then I think that speed is relative,

      and distance too. My thought masters it all.

      I am the lord of all that I survey:

      you reduce everything that you believe.

      There’s no catch. I’m as simple as the rain,

      and all I have to do is fall.

      Psalm 9 (a)

      the Lord shall endure forever

      Eternity could not exist except

      in God; tomorrow is nothing unless

      its soul is God; and today is a vast

      Korsakov’s Syndrome, blank, total, and rapt.

      Then let us ride the emptiness like fleas

      on a blind pachyderm—not only blind

      but lobotomized; not merely mindless

      but possessed of the blitzed sensibilities

      of true believers who have been drinking

      paint—proud of its size because it is blind,

      philosophically indifferent to fleas,

      without moral responsibilities

      if God is a wad of liberal thinking

      in a transient Jewish carpenter’s mind.

      Psalm 9 (b)

      the Lord shall endure forever

      Could God die?—but there is no subjunctive

      for God and death except for Nazareth.

      Take that moment, then: Pontius Pilate lives

      but all meaning has exhaled its last breath.

      Now what? Pretend nothing happens reversing

      the disappointment—no resurrection

      and no Amazing Grace: sheer mere perversion

      of everything worth claiming, perfection

      of imperfectability. Now we

      climb our minds like cats; we grow long white beards;

      we shoulder the writhing wild cross of Why;

      we say, To hell with it all, one more beer

      for the Empire. What a nightmare, what a danger,

      what a goblin gurgling in a manger.

      Psalm 9 (c)

      let not man prevail . . . that the nations may know themselves to be but men.

      If You hear all things, then what do You hear:

      stretched stiff in rags in graves, their prayers all said,

      are their old words living words, the lost poor,

      the liquidated, eradicated

      mothers, fathers, children burned up in wars;

      are they still preying on Your sacred head

      alive? When one child loses attention

      and is left there, is raped or given a gun

      or preached to, coughing, in a long alley—

      do You finally have a heart and listen, then?

      Will You do something—terrible—finally?—

      so nations know themselves to be but men?

      Ps. 9 (d)

      The needy shall not always be forgotten: the expectation of the poor shall not perish for ever.

      Calin

      1

      A quiet, gentle boy, he always was,

      and small; the dark eyes of a dying deer.

      “What would you do with a million dollars?”

      we asked him when he was ten—some fifteen years

      ago. He smiled. “I would buy potatoes!”

      He lifted up a board and pointed down:

      there was a two-foot space under the floor.

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