Ordinary Psalms by Julia Levine

Source of book: I own this.

 

Last year, my wife traveled to Davis, California, for a work-related conference. While there, she visited a local bookstore, and decided to get this poetry collection for me. 

 

Julia Levine has local connections to Davis - she lives there and is currently the Poet Laureate for that city. (Hey Bakersfield! Maybe you can do something like this, and make the news for a good reason for a change…) Levine is also a psychologist, and is currently using those skills along with her poetic skills working with children and their concerns about climate change. 

Ordinary Psalms is Levine’s most recent collection, and has a lot of poems about loss and grappling with her experiences in a world where God is, at best, silent. She is slowly losing her vision due to a degenerative condition, and as a lover of nature, this is a true loss. In another section, she writes about losing her childhood friend to cancer. Another friend dies by suicide. 

 

The poems are not downers, though - they feel real, visceral, and hopeful. 

 

Since Levine alludes to her own life a lot in the books, I looked up whatever interviews I could find, and pieced together some of her own trauma. She grew up Jewish, but it appears her family was of mixed religion. Her father, a surgeon, was abusive. Her grandfather molested her. Her mother was mostly dissociated and distant. I guess it should be no surprise that she went into psychology. 

 

Like myself, she was steeped in religion, and became quite familiar with the Hebrew scriptures - they pervade many of the poems, and, indeed, the title itself is a reference to the Psalms, which are also filled with lament and struggling with injustice, pain, loss, and the silence of Heaven. For a reader like me, there were many recognizable parallels connecting the writings of the distant past with the present. 

 

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect - I wasn’t familiar with Levine, and as in any age, there is a lot of mediocre writing that will disappear with time. However, I greatly enjoyed these poems. An unexpected treasure, one of the true pleasures in life. 

 

There are a lot of quotable lines within the poems - I will highlight a few of them, even though lines are better in context - and quote a few poems in their entirety. Because Levine is a living poet, I highly encourage buying the book so she is able to benefit from the beauty she has created for others to enjoy. 

 

I’ll also mention that the book quotes a bit of Anna Akhmatova, who I discovered a few years ago. Here is the full poem:

 

A Land Not Mine (Anna Akhmatova)

 

A land not mine, still

forever memorable,

the waters of its ocean

chill and fresh.

Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk,

and the air drunk, like wine,

late sun lays bare

the rosy limbs of the pinetrees.

Sunset in the ethereal waves:

I cannot tell if the day

is ending, or the world, or if

the secret of secrets is inside me again.

 

With that gorgeous poem to set the mood, here is my favorite of Levine’s poems on her blindness. 

 

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 asking, Sparrow or wren? Oak
 or elm? Because it matters

if the gray fox curled in sleep
 is a patch of dark along the fence line,

or if the bush hung with fish kites
 is actually a wisteria in flower. Though

even before my retinas bled and scarred
 and bled again, I wanted everything

different, better. And then this afternoon,
 out walking the meadow together,

my husband bent to pick a bleeding heart.
Held it close as I needed

to see its delicate lanterns,
 the shaken light.

ii.
 Deer, he says, our car stopped in traffic.
 And since I can’t see them, I ask, Where?

Between the oaks, he answers,
and since I can’t see the between,
                                                                I ask, In the dappling?                       
 He takes my hand and points
 to the darkest stutter in the branches
                                                                 and I see a shadow

in the sight line of his hand, his arm,
 his blue shirt with its clean scent of laundry,

my hand shading my eyes from glare.
 There! he says, and I can see
                                                               the dark flash of them
                                                               leaping over a fence (or is it reeds?),

                                                              one a buck with his bony crown,
                                                          and one a doe, and one smaller, a fawn,

but by then it seems they’ve disappeared
 and so I ask, Gone?
 and he nods.

We’re moving again,

                                                               and so I let the inner become outer

                                                               become pasture and Douglas firs
                                                            with large herds of deer, elk, even bison,

                                                            and just beyond view, a mountain lion

auburn red, like the one we saw years before,
 hidden behind a grove of live oaks,

                                                                                                listening.

 

I can feel her loss so deeply. My own ocular aging is more benign, but as one who had excellent vision for the first 45 years of my life, but who now requires glasses to see up close, I too have experienced a lack of acuity that pains me. I rely more and more on my camera to identify birds, and my kids see things I no longer can like I used to. Thus is life, and I am grateful at least to have been born in an era when glasses exist. 

 

This next one is one of my favorites from the book. 

 

Night Psalm

 

Beneath your arm like a fallen

            branch across my waist,

                        the nothing we know. In sleep

 

in a dream of a forest, a windfall

            of leaves broken and rusting,

                        I walk beside the child

 

I am charged with

            until she quiets,

                        takes my hand. Now

 

the moon rises as fixative

            between worlds. The city’s mute,

                        the call of night birds audible.

 

And feral, the self before words.

            Before we name, we see.

                        Before the part, the whole.

 

Soon it will return - the beginning

            that climbs over us as light,

                        Unlocking your good eyes, mine

 

nearly blind. Behind us

            the portals, the thin places,

                        the I before it remembers

 

the loss that it depends on. Before

            the question can ask, love

                        in this moment, the soundless

 

answers. The rose petals

            last night you swept into a bowl

                        set aside our bed to darken. 

 

Levine appears to have made a good marriage - her love for her husband and his gentle spirit pervades the book, with little moments like that sprinkled throughout. Perhaps poetry was a factor in her ability to break the trauma cycle. This next poem explores that. 

 

Antidote

 

It was there all along

in the winter afternoons

you lay in the boathouse

 

under the shadows of hoisted canoes,

beside empty slips crisped in ice.

You were back-flat

 

in loneliness, listening

for the approximations of god

to come as deer

 

through white pines

at the property’s edge.

Juncos and chickadees on the crust

 

of snow. You imagined death

as a floating into music

and happiness at the epicenter

 

where your mother was

no longer a broken promise,

your father setting down

 

his belt,

his spittled cussing.

But no, it was simpler,

 

it was all morning coming down

as thick fields of snow 

shaken over your boot prints

 

until your going was hidden,

and your body trembled with cold - 

then a presence

 

neither outside nor in, but both,

knelt down close

to ask you if you were ready to survive.

 

So many poems have fantastic lines about mortality. Here are the ones that stood out to me.

 

First is from “Lost Wetlands Preserve.”

 

How hard to admit time 

is simply the measure between

how we eat and are eaten - 

 

Or this one, from “Psalm with Violent Interruptions.”

 

Death is a plea bargain

I made under threat of never being born.

 

Dang. And this, from one of the laments about her friend’s death, “Anthropocene Psalm.”

 

When you are a kid, Mary once said to me,

forever is real. But lately I can feel it again: forever.

 

And I thought of death pausing a moment 

in the bodies of the living

 

while in the dead, 

it just goes on. 

 

This next poem contains another favorite line, but I think it needs to be read in context. 

 

Lamentation with the Detroit River

 

Perhaps nothing was beautiful,

but still my sister and I returned

to the current’s slag flushed

out of factories, and knelt there,

poking sticks into its green syrup,

daring each other to swim.

We knew something true

had been stolen from that river;

we wanted the wholeness of a thing.

The world before the wound.

We wanted our bodies to enter

the river’s clear run, the one before

the auto industry arrived,

then suddenly packed up and left

those kids from across the highway

living on muskrats and crabapples.

We wanted a river that did not slip

past a row of homeless men

fishing from the bridge. That night

I pulled my father’s Oldsmobile

off the road to get high,

a guttural outrage, plush with drink

and sorrow, echoed off the steel pilings.

At its source, a ragged man, a fish

swinging from his pole—a huge catfish

or carp, it was too dark to know—

but I could see the glint off

its spinning. Even then I got it—

his shock that the hook

had caught a grenade of turgid flesh.

It’s like the punchline of what is real

next to what you thought could be.

Or the rip current of my heart

pulling me under every time

I imagine my mother as a little girl

before she turns mean. In that

tiny apartment, her father with

a match to his pipe, inhales

the flare into a parasol of smoke,

a cherry stink lifting above them.

I can almost see her looking over

his shoulder at the photos

in his Yiddish newspaper—

it’s a white bonfire of bones,

a drift of skulls heaped together.

It’s the Holocaust

before it has a name,

and the mark a moment makes,

the sinker of consequence cast,

the dead weight at the end of any line.

It’s who you believed you’d be

before the world dropped you

into the course of what’s been done,

and named the current your life,

with no choice

except to ride that damn river down.

 

There is so much I love about this poem. Her imagining her parents before trauma damaged them (me too, me too), the juxtaposition of what could have been with what is. Whether in the environmental damage done to the river, the damaged humans fishing in it, her own parents, or her own life, she laments it. What might have been. 

 

That last line, though: 

 

It’s who you believed you’d be

before the world dropped you

into the course of what’s been done,

and named the current your life,

with no choice

except to ride that damn river down.

 

Just, wow. I get chills from that line every time. And it is true. There is a lot of what I dreamed my life might be, what I might be. Before the cult, before the loss of opportunity to choose college and career, before the rejection of my wife by my parents, before…And now I have no choice to go back - I have to just ride that damn river down. 

 

As a contrast, I loved this, um, nature poem. I generally love insects and find them fascinating. But I loathe mosquitoes, for reasons. I am not thrilled with flies. And alone of the amazing hymenoptera order, there are the striped assholes known as yellow jackets. 

 

Psalm with Yellow Jackets

 

They swarm gold behind the canoe,

as we paddle deeper

into the lake’s dark chords.

 

All of us impossibly old.

You and your brother cast out,

reel in perch, as I press my stung hand

 

against a clear rock of ice

you’ve set on the seat

beside me. The caught fish gleam

 

and shudder. Once 

I thought loss was the poison,

but now I see it akes us

 

to what might be missed:

water striders scribbling 

across the reservoir’s surface,

 

a kingfisher high in a pine,

stretching out her wings to dry.

The venom fires up

 

and down my arm

until I remember enough

to know nothing

 

and be amazed,

as sunlight sears inside my hand,

a slight wind riffing the water.

 

I’ll end with the final poem in the collection, one that reflects my own struggles over the last decade or so in deconstructing and yet reconstructing a spiritual connection that is felt, but not understood or understandable. The searching for a connection to the mystery of what is, rather than an exercise in tribalist hate, as it seems to be for so many. Levine also captures the feeling of winter in the San Joaquin Valley here in California, where winter, not spring, means the return of life. 

 

God

 

You know that hour in winter

when the light is salted gauze

 

and you stop a moment

in one of the last untouched fields

in this landlocked valley -

 

the new grass a rain-fattened green,

thick as uncombed hair.

 

Then the wild turkeys appear out of the brush

in their dark pilgrim plumage

and bowed heads

 

and fan out over the field, solemn

hunters of seed and grub.

 

This is the moment you need a prayer

from your animal self.

 

You need to praise

the black mud, the thickened air,

the pens of sheep in their black hoods and wool.

 

even the treacherous, untended road

that ends at a flooded slough.

 

On your old bicycle

with the jerry-rigged baskets and duct-taped seat

you pedal hard against a wind

 

that has come up from the southwest

carrying rain. Wind that breathes

 

the least branch alive,

wind that brings in the sea.

 

There you have it, a lovely modern poetry collection by an author I just discovered. I hope others enjoy it as much as I did.