De Profundis

All night, Oh God you hold my eyes open

My mind crawls like the sea restless, restless

My skin is a mouth I want to cut open

De profundis, Lord -- At 3 A.M. I call to you

from the darkened kitchen I call to you from the heaped sink I call to you sticky and swarming I call to you

Oh God, my God in tubes and tight-cornered sheets in paper slippers in straps and slow-sliding machines I call to you in a room of tight faces I call to you

in fluorescent lights I call to you in clips and binders in bills and numbers in meaningless work I call to you

Oh God, here I am having bad sex here I am on a blank road here I am with a shut heart here I am listening

By a pillbox, one soldier leans
The sky is heavy and stirring
The sea is heavy and stirring
No light
for his night watch
No words
in the salt crash
Time clots
like an old wound
like a beast of shadow
But he stands
listening, listening

Oh Lord, open the world
in lightning, let the thunder sing
between sea and sky
Let that band of air turn green
and fill with arrows

Let them say – Look
He walks on the water
Look, a door
in the sea

End this night
in violence
suddenly

Or draw me to you
like the dawn
rose and silent

Mostly psalm 77, with a little 130. The title is the opening line of psalm 130 -- "de profundis clamo ad te," "out of the depths I call to you." The De Profundis is one of the gradual psalms that's used by pilgrims, one of the penitential psalms that's still in the breviary, and the psalm that's said (or that used to be said?) over coffins before leaving the church.

I never center poems, but this time it
seemed to work.