(director: a David lyric, a song)

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This stunning crescendo of a psalm modulates relentlessly and almost invisibly. Psalm 65 starts as one thing, ends as something else. It begins centered in Jerusalem, celebrating quiet. “To you | stillness is praise / God | in Zion” (1). How is silence sufficient praise? Praise is usually defined in auditory terms, as shouts and song. How, to God, in Zion, does stillness “make a promise good” (1c)? By the end of the poem, however, we have learned how: “joy the hills | strap on / fields have dressed in flocks | vales are draped in grain / they shout | even more they sing” (11d-12). Things as they are are ample praise. Thomas Merton claims something similar: “A tree gives glory to God by being a tree.” Calm is praise because it is enough, and calm is praise because it allows one to notice what life does already.

There is a kind of economy set up in the first stanzas of this psalm, a typical economy of evenness—the shalom in “makes… good” (1). The worshipper offers God what God is due. She enters the yards of the tabernacle with praise, promise, and prayer. She is repaid “with justice” (5). That economy, however, gives way in verses 4 and 5 to something greater, an economy characterized by surfeit. It begins with a wish: “may we feel full | with the sweet of your house / the hallow of your halls” (4). Quickly, however, we launch beyond Zion, beyond full, mapping out the excess of the earth itself: “the leaning back / of the edges of land | and distant seas” (5). The earth’s economy already includes reverence and praise: “those who sit at the edges | they revere your signs/ the sources of dawn and dusk | you make ring out” (8). Time and space, morning and night, the edges of the world—how far we are flung.

The last two stanzas follow fullness and sweetness out of the sanctuary, celebrating the superfluity of the earth’s fruitful multiplying. All is overload: “You tended the land | to saturate it / with so much | you surfeit her” (9). The fullness of the soil makes plant life possible. “You set up their grain | which is how you set her up,” verse 9 jokes in earnest, seeing the vertical founding of the earth (“you set her up”) in the verticality of crops whose stems flow thick with water. Verse 10 follows that water everywhere throughout earth’s plants: “her furrows to flood | to swell her roots / with showers you soothe her | her blooms you bless.” The soothing, here and in verse 7, recalls the stillness with which the psalm began. So too the fullness in flood and roots and blooms recalls the feeling of fullness from verse 4. Sweetness (goodness) returns from verse 4 in verse 11: “You have crowned the year | with your sweetness.” It overflows: “your walkways | drip what’s ripe / they drip | the wild meadows do.” Even the images of dressing suggest that everything signifies a greater-than sign. Sweetness adorns. Joy is girded on. Flocks and grain are as clothes and cloaks, their existence a shout and a song.

We have become accustomed to talking about the supernatural as if there were a nature somehow sub-supernatural, the extraordinary as if there were an ordinary. In this poem’s vision, the experience of being drawn near to “the hallow | of your halls” (4) is met by “all edges of land | and distant seas” (5), the divine sweetness of the sanctuary spreads across the rooting and blooming of a world that is not supernatural but surfeited, spilling over. Words mean more than the things they signify—one need not cite Derrida to see this. But things themselves mean more than can be signified, this psalm says and celebrates. It’s something Blake might say: silence is excess and excess is praise.