Psalm 86—The Years You Were Always Elsewhere
Psalm 86—The Years You Were Always Elsewhere
"You remembered what you needed to remember too late."
Rendition
Listen to me, Lord, and answer me,
For I am afflicted
And I am in need.
Keep me and guard me,
For I have kept faith these years.
Deliver me—I trust in you, my God.
Give me grace,
For I call to you day after day.
Lead me back to joy,
For I offer you my very life to bear up and carry.
You are good and are ready to forgive.
Your unwavering love
Runs to all who ask for it.
Hear my prayer.
The day of trouble is near.
I need your favor to follow me
Out onto the ice.
When the cold water finds me
I will call out
And you will answer.
There is nothing like you
Among all the things that claim my love.
All the wayward nations you scattered
Will return and bow and take their place
In the long telling of your glory.
You are immense; your wonders waken us.
You alone are God.
When the snow falls,
Show me your way
That I might walk with you and not fall.
Unite the shards that my fears
Have made of my frayed heart.
I lay my whole self down
Beneath the weight of your glory.
The dark water is below me
And only your steadfast love
Holds me above the abyss.
O God, the things I thought I lost
Are rising up to seek my life.
O Lord, how can your love
Abide my renunciations?
You are slow to anger.
Your overwhelming love overflows.
You are faithful
Though I was always elsewhere.
I need your strength to stand—
The chasm is opening to swallow me.
I can’t see your way to walk in it.
Make me remember
The days when you helped me
And the nights when you consoled me.
Help me come back
From what I have done to myself.
Help me find again
The home I walked away from.
Notes on the Psalm
More than other Psalms in this project, the rendition of Psalm 86 is meant to be read in conversation with the poem that goes along with it (and with Psalm 142).
This rendition was less translation-heavy and I gave myself more creative freedom to snuggle it up right up against the poem in terms of its images and meanings, but I like the result.
Notes on the Poem
Along with Psalm 142, this poem sits in a mini-series within the larger project of the Darkling Psalter of poems that uses the image of water to reflect on memory, regret, life, and death.
In Psalm 142, the character of the poem finds themself on a glacier, “alone, alive, and improperly roped.” Similarly, the character of this poem finds himself endangered on ice. In this case, it is a frozen lake that was snowed over until for some reason the character couldn’t tell the difference between the land and the water.
“When the snow fell
You forgot the lake was there,
And walked out onto the ice.”
He has a series of epiphanies out on the ice and begins to regret the real reason he left home in the first place. (Which was….what, dear readers?)
He has the sense of wanting to go back to the house and change things, change his whole life. But it is too late.
“You remembered
What you needed to remember too late:
You had already wagered everything you had
Out there on the ice.”
One more note. Careful readers will begin to see themes and recurrent images emerge in these poems (like things rising up from the dark waters of a frozen lake, say). Several of them appear in this poem: going home, danger in water, last-minute revelations, people who have sought shelter in the wrong places, the chasm, being elsewhere. These won’t be the last time you see these images and themes. My hope is that, just like the Bible, the larger work of the Darkling Psalter will have repeated themes running through that deepen the meaning and unify the work.
Poem—The Years You Were Always Elsewhere.
When the snow fell
You forgot the lake was there,
And walked out onto the ice.
You looked back
at the house with all its lights.
As the cracks started to show themselves
and you didn’t want to leave.
You laid down
As a man who has seen the angel,
As death itself.
In the cold glass your own rumpled image
Pressed its cheek to yours
to whisper something
About the shards it had become,
About the rainbow bridge that passes out of seeing,
You saw the things beneath the ice:
The flotsam of your renunciations.
So much debris from old disasters
That found you without warning or herald or witness.
The years you were always elsewhere
And always regretting it.
The years the distance only grew between things
Though you tried to devote yourself
To the old fidelities you once believed.
So much lost to the water.
You pawed at the ice,
But you couldn’t reach any of it.
You shouted: “Come back! Come home!”
You promised your whole remaining days
If only everything would fly back to you
From the far side of the chasm.
You tried to stand.
The cold had you now.
You remembered
What you needed to remember too late:
You had already wagered everything you had
Out there on the ice.
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Photo by Tom Barrett on Unsplash
The poem is familiar, and I love seeing the echoes between it and the psalm. The psalm has a meditative weightiness. I really like the concept of “being elsewhere”—to me it denotes an inattentiveness to God’s movement in the world and our lives. This was timely—thank you.