"Psalm": A Poem by Lea Graham

"a tendril, a vine, a branch / from home I send to you"

Psalm

Psalm, (v.) to say or sing a psalm to or over. Obsolete. Rare.

For Charlotte, in memoriam (2008-2019)

i.

Calming words I learned 
in that house next to 
the largest pine (matting 
our hair when we 
climbed), crepe myrtle,
the graveyard our playground: 
we leopard crawled 
with toy canteens, ran through 
rain-flooded ditches like the valleys
of the shadow of death
where we feared 
no evil. Where we knew, 
for a time, no evil. 
A place where these words 
rooted, comfort me even now:
a tendril, a vine, a branch
from home I send to you, 
a table prepared in memory.
And lo, you are with me.

ii.

—beneath snow
and roses, November.

In all this blue now
the heft and lack stays.

I wake to replay old movies:
Casablanca, The African Queen

as if repetition 
was the simple 

for memory, a stave
against this earth.

Tired from my own voice
but why silence

while there’s time?
Grave songs. Grief sings

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Lea Graham is a writer, editor and translator who lives in Hyde Park, New York. She is the author of three poetry collections, The O.E.D. Odes (forthcoming), From the Hotel Vernon (Salmon Press, 2019) and Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You (No Tell Books, 2011), along with a fine press book and four chapbooks. She is co-editor with Celia Bland of A Jar of Air: The Work of Maxine Chernoff (forthcoming, MadHat Press) and editor of From the Word to the Place: The Work of Michael Anania (MadHat Press, 2022).

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