Linda Dove
Psalter for My Brain, With and Without Miracles
after lines from Psalm 102
i. For I have eaten ashes like bread, and mingled my drink with weeping.
The lemons of night hang from stout stems, ghost-fruit,
almost sting, almost rind, almost light. Ask and it shall be
asked. Ask for the branch to brush the mountain. Ask
for a plausible implausible reach. Ask for the sour
marvel and the rim of what’s possible. Crack your hands
into a roof, ribbed over palms. Everywhere is a beautiful
solace. Everywhere is a feasting and purpose. When you eat,
your body makes a house. In its windows, pith and seeds.
ii. By reason of the voice of my groaning my bones cleave to my skin.
Fire’s job is to return
bones, so flesh flames
white. It’s an inside-
out architecture,
frame surviving skin,
though nobody
recognizes you anymore.
Do not disrobe me
so soon. By reason of
this prayer, the you who is not
you will scavenge
a double-edge,
naked with definition,
such as, Cleave:
(1) to adhere closely; stick;
cling; to remain faithful;
(2) to split or divide;
to cut off; sever.
iii. I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.
Skimming for fish, I smash
into concrete. Home is a mirror
that mirrors home, as pavement
heats to a sea. All the advantages
of a lifetime amount to a trick.
Pelicans press sidewalks
to swallow them. Owls orbit
the obits, scoot across
the newspaper’s highway: it makes
a black and white desert.
I conjure the margins, canting
names. Your grip feels like the last
handhold on earth,
my gular pouch, my wing.
iv. I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.
It’s so hard to know how to plead. I say please
to the toast. To the sky, sure, but also to the table.
To the makeshift, to the impenetrable, to the tea.
I do not feel under any stretch of imagination.
The problem with asking is the answer, not
the question. Please, please, please. I have
other voices learn the refrain. I watch them
stop in, step through the door. I am not there.
Or, rather, I am there, but I am babbling
in another tongue. They leave by the same
strategy. They walk away, and I think how odd
that they multiply feet, one, then another.
v. They shall perish, but thou shalt endure:
yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment . . .
In a moment, lifetime, shift
of creosote scrub, the oldest living thing
pulls off its leaves. Vesture
of disarray on the ground. Is there
one spot from which the future
fans out? Fur boats skiff grass,
off the old dog whose skin
shrinks back against bone.
In death, he looks wolf.
All business and jaw.
As I write this line, a knock
at the door: the dog handed to me,
now the contents of a can. Now
ashes stuck to the keyboard.
As a vesture shalt thou change them,
and they shall be changed.
vi. But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end.
The child puts her eye close
to the surface to see the ends
of the waterbug. Whether
legs hover, like ghosts
or prayer. The body bobs.
She thinks they do not touch.
Bio
Linda Dove holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance poetry and taught literature and creative writing for many years. Her full-length collection of poems is In Defense of Objects (Bear Star Press, 2009), and a chapbook, O Dear Deer, recently won the first Eudaimonia Poetry Review Chapbook Award and was published in July. Poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and were a finalist for the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America. She lives in Altadena, California, with her husband, daughter, and two Jack Russell terriers.