THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM WAS MY BROTHER

66. THE TWENTY-THIRD PSALM WAS MY BROTHER:

I can't ever say why but something was calming me down in the middle of all the world's grief - oil-soaked penguins dead birds along the reef wildcats prowling in pits of poison gas-attacks in the open-air markets of Kabul - endless horrible things bespeaking mankind's dead brutishness one towards the other and all I could do was look away or shudder to a halt and I went speechless in the middle of LIFE life itself being a quandary of which I found nothing or very little to salvage : some guy named George walking along the canal in Frenchtown with some wicked crazy babe in tow and talking a mile a minute until the moment he saw me and we met and started the usual stuff about both where we'd been and how in the intervening two years and another guy walking his dog across a soon-to-be-graded field where a new plan for houses was already waiting and set and in place - sadness in every window and eave - and I could say nothing at all and the waterway was silent in the crisp Fall air - each boat having stayed in place and the slow rocking of the river-water around the bend led my eyes to Pennsylvania and something else far away (tho' I get home how late - how late / so I get home -'twill compensate / better will be the ecstasy / that they have done expecting me) and that fair triumphal regal music that I hear starts itself annoying me (the bandstand is a copy of something in Rome or so it was said when I later got home) and all I see HERE are scant'-clad girls in bodices and sheer tops with tight clothing clutching their rears and I wonder in such a place as this how anything became so risque and burlesque (or is it the tone of the times and the temper when no one now cares or notices the flesh?) and I know so many who've made love to a log or reciprocated feelings with stone and I know they're still pining for something other than all that emptiness - that which comes with empathy and all their stupid caring - and even that DOG was now sniffing the air or searching for clues or finding a care and AS IT IS it's always NOTHING or all of nothing or EVERYTHING and nothing at all - and in some tawdry finish it all evens out in the end and they build twenty buildings where before there was one and someone pipes up and says 'how beautiful everything is' and just like that ALL'S forgotten (and we've already moved on YES we've already moved on) yet if the LORD is my shepherd and I shall want for nothing then by the same token if all the wealth and riches of the world amount to NOTHING in the eyes of this God - is that what I'm really wanting this NOTHING that always shall come to be nothing? - and really 'restoring' the soul just sounds like SO MUCH WORK.