Psalm with a Phrase from Beckett

The boulder that is bigger than a house,

perched on the edge of another boulder, painted gold

and prayed to by monks in saffron robes.

This is you being somewhere for once.

The circle of men in the flea-market parking lot

pounding on paint buckets, conga drums, the noise bulky

and hot as a furnace. Tell them

they are heard.

                         If you are every morning

the world has ever had, the rose is the pharmacy

and brothel, visited and visited.

If I try to sing, it is like standing too long by the magazine

rack, a crime beheld by the clerk's warring eye.

That is your gazing too.

In one narrative of desire, the young poet can't see a field

for the field of broken stars

that has landed there among his own

and a lover's body.

                               Let the dark be longer for this.

Certain papers are made of rice hulls, lambs-wool, hemp

and bark, all the good bodies of things.

If there is everything to be done

let it be in this way of careful ingenuity.

Walking home, I clink my knuckle against fences

and trunks, the moon coming up

behind the hills like a thought.

By these means at hand you can only be proven.

Let the river clear of filth.

                                          Let him write his twenty-one

poems, one for every year of his age.

In still one more narrative about desire, a man makes

bracelets of the little bones of his neighbors

and sells them at the church fair.

Let this be time for you to drink

the blue sludge of airplanes. At dusk, the fog is happy

to take the place of the leaves on the branches,

fallen shiny as shoes on the ground.

Tell me you are here.

                                    Certain towns

in the Midwest have radio towers tall as lighthouses,

belated of a first ocean, red eyes on their bodies like gods.

Let the dark be longer for this.

Let him stop hearing the knives

of his parents, the knives in their fair use. Let him turn

from the words exploding

too small even for the dog to hear: quaquaquaqua.

Because that is your singing too.