Ordinary Psalms

Julia B. Levine, Ava Leavell Haymon

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780807175187
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Struggling to accept her impending blindness, the speaker in Julia B. Levine's fifth collection of poetry, Ordinary Psalms, asks everyday life to help her learn how to see beyond appearances into fundamental truths. As she contemplates the loss of one friend to cancer and another to suicide, along with her own visual impairment, Levine holds the world "close as I needed / to see." Imagistic, lyrical, and at times imploring divine intervention from a god she does not know or trust, these poems curse and praise the extraordinary place we live in and are in danger of losing. Lamenting that "this world is a mortal affliction / with wounds in the beautiful, " Ordinary Psalms provides a seductive and lyric rumination on radiance, loss, and grief.

I

Psalm with Wren in Daylight Saving Time

Late afternoon, I chop onions by feel,

listening to crows cry to each other across the ridge.

Gone now, white recipe card on the white floor,

green sea glass found on a Humboldt beach.

But this hour I have been given back, carried out

of gorse, red flash of maples, finches in our cedar.

Meaning, today I returned for the first time

to the moment I understood I was going blind.

Months I hid from myself that the V of geese

flying over the valley extinguished too soon into fog,

a darkness fine as sugar sifted over the chard, the roses.

Now I hear the soft tick of a bird landing on the counter.

Feel her gaze turn away from mine. When she hops

table to chair to floor, I open all the windows and doors.

Sometimes we must drag our grief out of the river

and put our mouth on it. And then a loosening comes.

One morning I rose and sat outside on my lawn

under budded glory vines. There is no hurry, I say

to the stirrings of one so small it has to be a wren.

Once I let the missing in, there was possibility.

There was a heavy rain in sun—every blade of grass

blurred, and for a moment after, only shine.

Psalm with Near Blindness

i.

The world mostly gone, I make it what I want:

from the balcony, the morning a silver robe of mist.

I make a reckless blessing of it—the flaming,

flowering spurge of the world, the wind

the birds stir up as they flock and sing.

Edges yes, the green lift and fall of live oaks,

something metal wheeling past,

and yet for every detail alive and embodied—

the horses with their tails switching back and forth,

daylilies parting their lobes to heat—

I cannot stop ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• — I —
• — II —
• — III —
• — IV —
• Acknowledgments
• Notes