PSALM 104

by Erik Ehn

In the science fiction of it he in the middle of the story is one of the velocity royals, rolls up  planet to planet across the system in the days of shorter distances, the collapsing galaxy. 

Whiparound the rings of Saturn. There is atmosphere in this wafer, the vehicles are  acoustic – made of strings and wind chimes, bangle as they go. 

He is a velocity king. Sitting is fast. Expending. She. 

His wife will have no one of it, organic farmer back on earth. Rotates the rye and wheat.  Mind as clean as a washed radish, heart as fragrant as fennel. Carries across the lot the  hundred pound sack of myrrh. Grows strategic resin and holy herbs for the local churches  and temples, bakes the showbread. Prays the tree. The noon-pig sleeps. Thunder, rain, no  wind, sits against the tree, prayed out, cooling for the afternoon work ahead. Lizards write  Isaiah 14 in the dust. 

Give me a heart of fire that sees only God, shows only God. 

What grows tender 

What grows rough 

Love of the racer 

Causing me dust 

When you stand up in this boat, all goes applejacks. He sails regatta across the blue wounds  of Jupiter. Sends small prize money home, as often asks his wife to cash more of their 401K  to pay for hubcaps and razor blades. 

Song losing the radio, they think and think across deep space, think to each other. He smells fresh pie – shortening and cherries, shortening flaking the crust 

Later rushing foot contest on Pluto games honoring the planet’s demise. The game this time  is to get around the planet before it falls, melts a boiling glint, droppers to the sun. Ladled  out of there just in time. 

Silly, silly crash-landing man. 

Coughs like the last jar of mixed berry jam exploding. 

Love you like breaking into the pie. 

Forget the loss of life, leaching, we – thinning. Remember the small of your back. Can make  you out in the crowd of the clouds. 

This day, on this day, you teach me the chords to Mama Tried. This day, on this day, you  teach me what to do with my hips during a two-step. 

This day, on this day, three letters come from you at the same time. 

This day, on this day you get your new tooth. This day, on this day, there are no orphans  because you say yes to everything. 

This day, on this day, I kiss your ear is the first time you eat nasturtium from my salad. Move your hand through me, a swimmer. 

Early days of the marriage as society crumbles and matter plays accordion between heat  death and nova, they live in a deer blind three years. Live by the trestle. Live at the  botanical garden’s out-building. Two. Spit adrenalin. Make do. 

I love you but don’t go touching my face for no reason. 

Solar systems last days. Their marriage and the end of their minds as the universe marches  towards stutters out. 

Until the day when God’s house… Until the day when God raises up God’s terrible house. Races until a racer no more, can’t afford galactic bus back to earth. 

I will need a cane today, diabetes feet. 

Write you a love letter in language so plain you’ll think I’m picking a fight, and I am, and  nobody’s going to win, it’ll be to the finish, and we’ll feel stupid for not getting to the point  sooner, but then we wouldn’t have so much room – in all this damage and removal – to wait  with God for God, together, ordered steps; head, heart, and gut: gratitude refined. 

Middle of the day before their minds are systems in heat death and nova: She, at a noon, lavender, bees: 

Solid blue hawk swings low between the trees. 

Sky – stars in flux. 

Alloy of iron and air, breathable rust. 

“The miracle is that the layer continues to be stripped away, each time uncovering a  center more brilliant and more revealing than the ones before. Amazing that this  should be the way our love, our knowledge and our lives keep unfolding together,  leaving us constantly renewed, knowing you exist anywhere in this universe makes  my world that much larger and that much more filled with light” (Jeanne Lee). 

The space around your head, fulla dragonflies. 

“Take a breath. Let it go” 

Jeanne Lee, radio. 

House will come down, whole city, the fort, the church, the police station, the hospital.  There is no safety, only trust. Take a breath. Horse eyes roll, separate, each to a different  threat, he is made of spirals. 

How does anything end? Returning breath. I was drawing your face. 

May we rise in kindness. 

Sun a rich red, copper ready for the pour. 

Night of the solar system eats a hand pie, real pig lard. Breaks open, sits and shares. 

Opposite ends of the solar system, making ends meet. He’s a freelance daredevillist, racer;  she farms. They watch metonymic streams. 

There’s nothing of the river that withholds the river. It’s river all the way through. Feel the  water of you drying across my sobering face. 

We’re there back in the time of lifting. When his hands were good and he could play Cecil  Taylor. When her breath was good and she could sing Jeanne Lee. Stroke you the way river  combs the night out of day, combs the day into night’s rich hair. 

Culls wild onion 

Finds you sage, burns it. 

Persevere. 

God guide me to kindness. 

On that day, you will firm the jam with boiling and use no pectin, densely sweet. On this day, rain won’t come and is cough in the throat of the frightened dog. On that day – rural Italian funeral with clarinets and tambourine. 

On this day, clean foot with a knife. 

On that day, knife sharpened by Saint Agatha. 

On this day, road pours zinc and ash in my mouth. On this day, ants at the fallen  locusts. 

On that day, new moon turns into anti-sun. 

He seems to be sitting still but is invisible-swimming in a meet across an invisible sea on  Mars. Swimming, thinking. 

Hear guns up on the hills, the night… and we lost the house. They come with bulldozers.  The hot goes out of the hot air balloons and they land slowly, birds.

I can’t reach; you the reaching is love. 

I can’t wait. the waiting is love. 

Got to know when the fish stinks and it’s time to go. you can let go of me now. No. 

Old, they steal her service dog. 

An important skill we neglected to pass on to the rising generation: forgetting. They do not  know how to forget. 

Spits across a broken tooth.  

Rides a bike in the massive gravity of one of the gas giants until a hip breaks. 

I know that things end, every single thing. Forms dismantled by insects, every planet has  them. She dies first 

Unlock her thymus, and there are grains there that can be used to make instant coffee, he  drinks the round black hole 

Rears back through the Chrysler siren, yowls with plutonium dogs, sings Lord I am your  Child. 

Courtship: rubs her feet with olive oil helps her saffron her day over to day, helps her  juniper and sage night into night, as the last sun lets the scents out. Courtship, very early: boy tries tricks on a too-heavy Raleigh; a girl filming herself on her board overthinks and  blows the ollie. 

Color of saffron rolled between the fingers, yellow as robes. 

You have that feeling of wanting to begin. 

You will have to lose everything; you will have to move into the always-more with the  always-loving, not by losing this or that but by being loss, by only losing, being in the  posture of losing, which is similar to gratitude or generosity. ’Lorn of property and pride. There love meets love and beats fear into hope and if you lose hope, and fall through the  floor of fear back to the beginning and before the beginning to that desire for love, before love, well then, there you are. Cut anywhere you get the ontic slice. “Fly me to the moon and  let me dance among the stars…” 

Finally cuts her hair to her white hair to her age apt length, her hands shaped as if she were  always trying to grab on to her worn fingers, can’t get to her hands any higher than her  shoulder without struggle. Makes herself a white linen cap for her bald spot, hazy in the  power of night 

Darlin’, why that crazy hat? 

Crazy head. 

Crack by crack, she is shuddering, shedding, shining. Scratch by scratch, letting light out,  but she can’t see it because light is coming out her eyes and everything graduates in  brightness at the same rate until it’s all light and then she’s virtually blind. Lights’ her way  to go blind, letting go of what she sees. 

God grant me the grace of a good beginning 

God grant me the grace of a good beginning 

He having fallen broken hipped down years back to earth sits by the river and sees God in  all things. Coffee of her then – I will have some vodka now I will have some vodka please. 

He sets a paper cup filled with vodka on fire and it burns in the pre-dawn, down to a mote  in the eye effort of the north star rising. He was triathlete on Venus once, holding breath in  the poison gas. 

Be my purple crayon. Show me where to go. 

Grew runner’s muscles in the early days of the marriage – making ends meet, stealing the  copper flashing off the roof of the new construction. 

Now: fires; the spices burning up the abandoned farm in the twentieth year of drought.  

Holy the haze side to side; one lung is Jesus the other lung is the Holy Spirit. I wheeze; give  me a stronger body for Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Coolness. 

But the husband-bee loops in the burnt-spice caul. 

He and wife, they smoke Psalm 104. 

They are archers. 

There are too many of you. Too many tents, rags, choked throats, tilted chimneys. Too  many of you, stirred by the moon. 

She spins. Clutches at his net. Dance my dance. 

His mind fails. His mind, soft as lead. His lungs fail. His breath too thin, can’t carry sense  through his brain irrigate understanding. His life a broken net. 

What is she doing by dancing? Begging. What shall we give her? She is not begging for what  we can give. There in him: a heart on fire. The fire of his heart is a mirror of God. His fire  sees only God and shows only God.  

If you’re looking for the sun, it sleeps in the night house. It falls out of the window and is  taken care of by girlfriend moon, the rabbit in the moon. At night the sun can walk around  wounded, can fall wasted and cared for through the woods and put its head in my lap. 

The sun has to borrow car keys from the moon’s purse, in there with her cigarettes and  lipstick. 

The cook forgot to turn off the propane so we eat yesterday cold. 

Hands the temperature of windows. 

Holding her tight enough to feel her religious medals and the shape of her navel. He floats a way like a cigar in the night. 

Laid out dead she was the size of a dog. 

Songs of mantis-fine vibration 

The deer's bed is saturated with light from the star called Sirius.

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