Dead Men's Praise by Jacqueline Osherow

Author:Jacqueline Osherow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Dead Men’s Praise
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 1999-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

II (PURE SILVER/SEVEN TIMES)

The words of the Lord are pure words, refined silver (clear to the earth)/ (in a furnace or the earth), purified seven times.

Psalm 12:7

The degraded man says in his heart there is no God.

Psalm 14:1

Let’s pretend, for an instant, we’re not degraded,

That we’d know, if we heard it, the sound of pure silver

Fired in a furnace seven times.

Could it possibly be transcribed?

And if it’s clear to the earth, who needs transcription?

And if it’s furnace of the earth, why are we listening?

An earthly furnace for the words of God?

Unless David means his own earthly body,

How he crossed words out, rewrote them, seven times,

Or tried chanting them, his mouth not his,

Mumbling beneath his breath, there is no God

Unless He’s here beside me, writing psalms,

Offering a kingdom for some molten words

Perfected in an oven seven times….

Only David didn’t say that about God;

That’s an innovation of my own,

Which is why God never trusts me with His store of silver.

Imagine. All that untranslated vision,

The earthly furnace a courtesy to us,

To let us know how very lost we are.

God’s refinements always come in sevens:

Here, too, the first brought light and, therefore, darkness,

The second worked to disentangle chaos,

The third divided fluid—meaning—from solid,

The fourth made a hierarchy of brilliancies,

The fifth made portions float while others soared,

The sixth refashioned it as human speech,

And the seventh gave it poetry, its Sabbath.

Unless it wasn’t all that complicated:

God spoke to David from His holy mountain

And David was reminded of, say, Bathsheba’s bracelets

As she took them off to come to bed.

It could be a matter of wishful thinking—

My friend who swears she saw her daughter, in a coma,

Move, when she asked her to, her arm.

But who’s to say she didn’t move her arm?

That when David lured Him with his purest words

God didn’t answer from a holy mountain?

And even if pure words are an invention of desire

In the face of everything that’s horrible

(Is that the earthly furnace seven times?),

Surely they are, nonetheless, still pure….

Perhaps clear to the earth means transparent,

And all the words are written on the air,

A hundred thousand verses in the open space

Between me and these pages of the Psalms,

Each revised entirely by any passing breeze

As clouds and moon and stars plunder their silver

And sift it through the heavens seven times.

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