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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

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