Cherubims
by Edward Clarke, author of A Book of Psalms Poem
I contemplate this room
And it looks a bloody mess, the carpet strewn
With bits of stuff,
Unhoovered fluff,
And my dried-up mind that lies inside it,
A flash flood, which left its fulness on the walls
As it departed, all
Our things sullied and redeposited.
The beings that made this mess
In their most high and eternal dance of excess
Of knowledge of God
Must think it odd
I’m not so lifted up into the light
Of their kind of composite contemplation
In superabundant elation
Since I’d contain in these walls what’s most godlike.
But then they do not think
As I pretend to do when these words drink
Them in and are freed.
They cannot read
Even the words set forth in holy scripture.
They are so filled with light their minds are blind
To what is on my mind:
The landscape of its naturalistic picture.
They are of the highest order
And can but, on the snowy ridge of that border,
Participate
And imitate,
As close to Christ as my two boys when they’re
Tickled before bedtime and they behold
As cherubims of old
The face of your deepest radiance everywhere.
I look for the text of their hymns
So I might surpass these radiant cherubims,
But find the scroll
Is lost, the whole
Of it, they say, even a fabrication.
But then the floorboards creak above, I hear
A waking yawn, and peer
At a song hurriedly transcribed in elation.