vitalwholeness

Scott Cairns, prolific poet and professor of English at the University of Missouri, has issued another collection of poems under the title, Idiot Psalms (Paraclete Press, 2014). The entire series is punctuated by a series of fourteen psalms and connecting commentary poems between them. The psalms are composed by Isaak, his imaginary writer. Here is the first:

Idiot Psalm 1

a psalm of Isaak, accompanied by Jew’s harp

O God Beloved if obliquely so,

dimly apprehended in the midst
of this, the fraught obscuring fog
of my insufficiently capacious ken,
Ostensible Lover of our kind – while
apparently aloof – allow
that I might glimpse once more
Your shadow in the land, avail
for me, a second time, the sense
of dire Presence in the pulsing
hollow near the heart.

Once more, O Lord, from Your Enormity incline

your Face to shine upon Your servant, shy
of immolation, if You will.