Psalm Sequence
Psalm 1: Peace of Mind
–home,
go back.
There will be people home
and they will be alive
with salutations among the living,
bristling sex, energy, body and spirit,
and the cries that trail behind all that jazz.
There were people in your dreams
last night
and while who can say if they’re bygone
neither were they living.
That will be the difference
between places of peace and welcoming
and a place of the skulls.
Places of peace. And ruin. And the only difference.
**
Peace of mind will scurry, like fire ants scattering,
a flight of frightened and submissive flags,
a Northbound/Southbound/ shirking and directionless migration.
Peace of mind bustles, a disintegrating hive,
hording, blazoning in between savage confusion and total organization.
Peace of mind scavenges the tinsel that never replenishes.
The magpie’s children starve, or grow into stubborn spirits.
Peace of mind will take a long while to cultivate
and an abacus of days to convince
yourself in spite of yourself/ the untimely
pulse beat that dissents/ you aren’t
nostalgizing its green meadows into birth and beatitude
patience of ants/ nitpicking/
rebuilding/ blanched
to yellow nothingness
beneath the summer
wash/ sleep blessed underneath the intensity
and swirl
and cleanliness rinsing
skulls and bones/ places of peace to phantasm
and ruin/ the longest hours to the shortest to lose
Psalm II The Remembered Past
and the finest
hours that you
have enjoyed this year
come with strings attached,
like frills hanging from kites.
The remembered past
is windlessly unwinding; the present
is a castle of stone
slowly sinking
giving sway
O kings O kingdoms
suffering tidal lashes
nibbling at the edges
of Camelot: the castle
in memory still Caliban's retreat
bedeviled tropical island fruit
Camelot island has been
losing peripheral ground
to the watercourses
nobody remembers
the rumors anymore
back in the day, the old school
and scatology, the stories
before the seventh grade
surrounding the island lighthouse
in that not-so-distant
past prefiguring the
present period's
apropos of nothing much
before the nostalgic erosion
dissolves Camelot and Chronos
and all that's essential that is left
like an aspirin in water.
PSALM III: DWELLINGS
She thoughtlessly thought she married a man, not a single digit, just like any other man, not a single finger always pointed in accusation. Home. History. Dice. Cards. A broom. A broomstick. A mop. A rag. A wet rag. A duster. A scrub brush. A scrub brush holder. A nail in a wall. A wall without tears. A sink with a running nose. A sink with a kidney infection. A sink with cramps. A sink with dishpan hands. A stone bird. A stone bird from K-Mart. A migrant flock. A tea plate. Hung on the wall. An illustrated plate. The image of the Last Supper. This bread is my body. A photograph. A man with full cheeks. A man choking on his food. His mouth hung open. His hand covering it up. His manners impeccable. A faux preacher. A glass top table. A glass top table filled with photographs. A Cross. A dangling icon. A pretty bauble. A prayer of the day. An illustrated calendar. On the calendar, one day has been scratched out: far in the future—not only checked, x'd out—that day will not exist, when it comes, it will not happen. The day she deceives her husband, her hand and mind fantastically coordinated. She picks up the phone, and her gesture throws a shadow of her hand clutching a teethed comb. An iron skillet. A sharpened file. A weapon. Using it, though her thoughts jar, she calls the number—preserved under the bowl where her dentures lay in frothy water—of a Realtor who can market value her history. Breath sucking through her gums, as she does when she is fitfully asleep—though she isn’t asleep, though she is living a day that is outside her chronological years—her chronological life span -- she calls with a wrinkled hand and, with a shadowy weapon, with an angry pencil, writes it.
Psalm IV: Dark at the Fresh Start
Dark that lasts so long
wafts like a fanning plant, so lullaby
-like. And spreads. And sways.
And thins. And thins. And bends.
Remember, however:
Dark never breaks
like a treetop bough.
Dark is a means to an end.
The creepy crawlers ubiquitously
unshutter their eyes
tonight, less
to gather the world
to see anything at all
than weigh the blight.
The blight in general
wafts like a fanning
plant, they know this.
They study the gradations
like living situations:
Nothing much is lost.
It lightens at the edges
like sleep.
Not a modicum wasted in dissipation,
in night-speak marginalia; the green
-species crawlers whether they
pigeonhole the archness
suck up or see-through
the nocturnal mulch
lay the wet sounds in ground in storage.
Dark that lasts so long.
White noise. It bulges in their purses.
***
Remember, however
like a hyped gangly child,
dark will skip, leap, scamper,
slipping through the thickest heavyset bushes,
outrace you to the margin-line,
the flowing water's edge,
beats you, sucker, beats you down
Psalm V: Come and Join the Dark
Come join the family darks
who graduated the public schools, skulls dilated
larger than exotic house plants. So
far everything in life has grown from
seed and watering. There has been bitterness, too,
in the night, nights of too many
stark tears, the darkness a peculiar
skittering, skittering in the ceiling –
shy as a vanishing fawn; dark the fabled tree
where the stillborn baby lies buried
dark inside a shoebox somewhere back
that you have heard rumored since
the family get together where Uncle Lee
drank so much he took a pee
and out of his piss sprang the first flowers of spring.
But if someone who was nobody's brother or
sister's favorite foolish foil sisterly meddled
in the middle of a fabulous story, gro-
tesque inbreeding, stolen kisses beneath
flowering trees, incestuous activities in the hay,
shit, mush, pig crust barely hidden in the straw,
a mouth twisted in disgust like a backwards cap,
he would be handed a gravedigger's shovel
unwashed from a throwaway pile and pointed
in very dark directions; he would be told
– sorry, they whispered, snickered, gestured, see –
to do a job that was too dark for you or me.
Psalm VI
You don't fall asleep in any one place.
You shunt several places, states, saturnalia
and balance them. And walk suspension bridges
no less than the mischievous showcase seals
chasing the bright red rubber balls, chancily spinning.
Several cityscapes, lines. The way the worst of it
breaks inside you along
-side the best of it. The final judgment
is no less random than critiquing a hotel room
in an Arctic zone.
Whether this was good sleep, bad sleep,
good sleep, bad sleep: too many factors
in increments readjust the room temperature to the body.
The Next Psalm
– bellies pallid/ swimmingly transparent/
fishy-mouthed
less phlegmatic than filmy
a wormy, intractable iridescence
as piquant as caviar eggs/ a sudden gloaming/
at shore side
soulless all under
crawling like slugs
near the rocks sullen.
Running in schools
flecked silvery –
and harvested beneath bone whitish
sheds, semi-precious,
elemental,
more perfect than stone
richly polished
washed of celestial excesses
man's space age aquatic –
Our palms
blanched
colorless as asteroids
craggily knuckled and witless.
We set them aside.
We lay them down.
We put them
ceremonially down: our Bibles,
the sodden bulk bulging, spreading
lachrymosely wet sheets, wet, slick papyri,
then lifted our hands.
Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is the 2021-23 Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico. An uprooted Southerner who is now a New Mexican, he has been a professional journalist for over 20 years, with articles, fiction and poetry in The Nation, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Boston Review, and many other places. His essays on poverty, economic justice, race relations, African American history, civil rights history, and post-Katrina New Orleans have appeared in The Nation, The Progressive, The Christian Science Monitor, The Atlantic, Dissent, Crisis (The NAACP magazine), The Guardian, and many more. He has appeared as a guest on the Tavis Smiley Radio Show and is presently a Writing Fellow at the Center for Community Change in Washington, DC. In the arts (sometimes in life) he loves playing with fire.