Interferon Psalms: Psalm 4

By Luke Davies

The old geologies will disappear as the mountains erode, one pebble, one day, one freeze-thaw cycle at a time. Doesn’t it all end up as limestone? I had had no idea how slow slow really was, since I was far more familiar with panic. In a Copenhagen summer, long ago, she had said, “The day just passes so fast.” Myself, I was thinking, “Life.”

The uplifts will pulverise to trace minerals, one day. The nutrients will nourish the new world.

I was preoccupied, emerging into the interglacial from the glaciation of my distress.

The present could turn so busy. I’d wake each morning, my blood mid-percolate, the day’s hair-triggers of desire and chaos hovering as always as yet unborn, and some days it’s all radio K-FUCK blaring inside me, so I turn down the dial on that one, O God of Hosts.

And the red-crowned cranes float down through the menace.

•

The world will be silent for thousands of years. Today, that made the loneliness even worse.

•

The panthers and jaguars came in from the jungle. They prowled the bollards where the ships once waited. All buckled concrete and thistles now. When the sluices have silted and the rain broken through, the rain-catch holes will disappear. The world will be silent for thousands of years.

I thought sadness was the route to forgetting, but months later anger was like a detour, and the smog settled on the city and made the dusk a glory, so I praised Yahweh, saying Holy One of Being, I am Yours and my Dreams are Yours. All that remained was to get to the gym. I did nothing for ages. I was trying to imitate the large-scale structures of being.

But superclusters aside, I was generally part of the problem not the solution.

What else was there, but versions of sugar? There were other things, I know, I knew. But I was wandering in circles on an ice floe, for all I knew. A bag of sugar to keep me distracted and warm.

There were other things. But I couldn’t be everywhere at once.

•

Purple asters split the pavement. Sun-bleak loneliness of forms. I revelled in the solitudes.
The petrochemical dodecahedrons which filled the air and rendered so pretty the dusks were pressed to the asphalt by the first rain in months. Thousands of years later they were well and truly absorbed into the soil. One might even say dispersed. (I had had unfinished business in other combinations of molecules. It all came out in the wash.)

My blood was crawling with messianic impropriety. I was a plasma-electric hybrid; it gave me more staying power through the galaxy of my auto-disdain. Or love, I forget which. Or loves.

My heart was hot within me. While I was musing, the fire burned.

It was a pleasure doing business with my doubt. I was so satisfied with my eternal present, I had long since forgotten what hope was. In a good way.

This is an excerpt of a poem originally published in Slake No. 4. To read the entire story, purchase the issue or subscribe at shop.slake.la.