Ordinary Psalm in the Anthropocene

Until you awake, the voice said.

Outside, the dog we'd named Lambstood in water up to his chest, barking at the pool sweep.

Sun strained the Douglas firs. Dust rose like an annunciation.

I had walked into the kitchen for a glass of water,and she followed.

"I won't fight once it goes to the brain," she said.

"We went to the lawyer last week,and now I have the two pills I'll need."

We wept together at the kitchen counter.

God, I thought, are you never sorry,or always?

________

I could no longer see

out of one eye, and the othervandalized, cracked and taped so that strange shardsof light flew in.

We were walking through the arboretum, the mallardsand the drab brown ducks, young mothers passing us with strollersfatted with children, plush and naked.

The creek an odorous, radioactive green.

And I was thinking, But this is blindness:to have babies in the sixth extinction.The largest iceberg in history

stepping into sea,while the nearest hills burn.

And I was remembering, too, how once,passing a crape myrtle in full bloom, every leaf, every branchcrowned with fuchsia,

Mary stopped, gasping,so that I froze, terrified she was in sudden pain.

But it was beauty, the way it enters sometimes

like a knife, and we both felt it then,not so much the sting of the blade itself,

but apprehension of the afterward,

what would be pried away.

________

In that first peach of summer, Mary's husbandbrought her the visceral paradise of it

in brilliant flashes on her tongue,and I thought of how he could see

perfectly, and yet, in her telling,all through the blasted furnace of July,

he brushed his hands across her skin,as if to touch and then to taste

was not simply what he needed,but the only way to know.

________

Suddenly pianos appeared in front of the county library,the downtown square. The homeless listened,

sprawled half-naked, their blankets and trash bagsset up around them like an inside-out house.

I kept thinking, Mary, Mary, Mary,as if the wrong choice had been made somewhere.

And I kept hearing how each piano had a playerwalking his hands over the keysof a closed box,

so that singing out of darkness there rose a kingdompronouncing the spirit flickered in the incurables too.And blindness was just a nap

until you woke.

________

But I had. It was 4:00 am and silentexcept for the air conditioner humming.

Lamb, still in his harness, was asleep beside our bed. Lucifer slid into the serpent. Eve, he saidlike any salesman searching for a secret hunger,what is good if you know nothing of evil?

The Garden was ominously quiet.The endangered animals, in pairs, looking back and forth,wondering when the next ark would arrive.

"When you are a kid," Mary had said to me last night,"forever is real. But lately I can feel it again: forever.Just barely. Just briefly."

And I thought of death pausing a momentin the bodies of the living,

while in the dead,it just goes on.

"Mary,"I said to the darkness—

________

suddenly remembering that in my dreaman oriole, a bird I hadn't seensince I was a small child,

had struck itself dead against my glass door,and I had gone outside to cup it in my hands.

But what woke me

was not the nearly weightless black hood,the brilliant, fiery breast,

but the song coming through the room, a mumbled sanctus of soundrumbling from inside the walls, my throat,

as if a hole had openedin the absolute fluency of the vastand wild vernacular of time.

And there had come a momentinto the liminal space betweenthe bodies of the living

and the dead, the memory

and the actual,close enough to touch, to see.