1—A Sudden Love
What drove those psalms across his seething brain?
Something shocking? Something vast? Some blow,
some shattering tremor in the bones?
A sudden love.
A stunning passion strikes and wakens the fire,
that singing fire that sleeps below the mountain,
and the man rises to seize the mad task—
so young King David’s blood-hot hands were driven
to grasp the beastly innocence of his love.
Even at war, David sang of God—
but whose streaming hair, flashing in the sun,
struck that tremor in the helpless king’s bones?
Whose bright body shattered him into song?
2—David’s Secret Last Words to Solomon
I was young! Shepherd, poet, killer, king.
My voice had power to hurl God’s massive name—
that dazzling cry—from the hills to the shouting sea.
I was fire! Racked by song, wrung wild by love!
But now: snared in the fangs of that Master of Death,
a trembling rat shaken in the Great Dog’s jaws,
an old chewed bone wrapped in quilts.
God is a fist! That Molder of Bliss and Blood—
His word sweeps like a stormwind across my brain;
He commands:
David, you fountain of psalms that rise
like lava roiling up from the night, seething
ablaze and grim in your singing, shameless heart:
strike that fire in your son, you dying king—
We will stretch his soul on the glorious rack of song.
My son, my Solomon—poor crown-saddened king—
He will ask of you more than sword or stealth or wit.
Now close your eyes, you will live what I lived as I lived it—
I will teach you to brave the dark that burns in the marrow,
to grapple eye to eye with your own brief beauty
sealed fierce in the breath: the onset of song.
Look! See what she was: my source, my spring!
There! Rising, rising out of her pool,
Bathsheba, curved like a harp strung with desire’s
despair—Yes! Those darkly gleaming arms
that lay me down in the ringing meadows of peace,
hailed me singing above my spear-torn valley,
up from the gullies of fear,
for she was with me.
Do you see her? She was the fire that burst from the ground,
the boiling spring that cleansed my song of lament
for the lamb lost to the wolf.
I was the wolf:
David, the king, the wolf.
God gave her to me!
He gave, and He laughed—
a howl in the sleepless dark.
My Solomon—proud, powerless king—you too,
and more than I, will be saddled, ridden, and whipped
by gold, by rule,
by the shining, pitiless lash
of a girl’s hair wild in the highland wind.
Such wounds one day will bleed you to song, a gift
for the Giver of Song, Tuner of the Sounding World.
It is time: Goodbye, goodbye, the flesh fails—
No tears, my child, no tears; recall, you are king!
I am passing into my last, my lasting light,
but there I will learn what neither care nor craft,
nor wealth, nor women, nor prayer, nor praise could teach.
When you and your wisdom die, my son, we will talk,
we will laugh together in God’s unbounded noon
where all is told in that still, that immense gaze.
Now this is my prayer, this is my song for you:
May He kiss you awake with the kisses of His mouth, so sweet,
so rich, so sharp, ah wild as the autumn wine,
that cure to cure us all who are sick for love.
Paul Panish’s poetry has been published in a number of literary journals including Signal, Bluestone, The Formalist, War, Literature, and the Arts Journal, Poetica Journal, The Raven’s Perch, Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, and others, going back to the 1960’s.
