Analysis of "Psalm to Be Read with Closed Eyes" by D. Nurkse

 Some things I looked up when I read this poem again.  What is the name of a five line stanza?  First thought for me was Cinquian, but that's also the name of the poetic form.  This isn't a Cinquain in that sense.  Another word is quintain.  This is more apt.

"Psalm."  Initially I thought "prayer," but I wanted to make sure and the definition is "hymn, or sacred song."  For me, the focus of the poem is spiritual -- about that in-between state between the actual and the memory; the here and the past.

"Ignorance will carry me through the last days, / the blistering cities, over briny rivers / swarming with jellyfish [...]"  The speaker is confronting the last of their day, or perhaps all of humanity.  The imagery does go towards big encompassing images: cities blistering in the sun to a little more focus but just as big rivers, to a more enveloping image of jellyfish.  I think the last image is gambling that the reader feels consumed as foreshadowing. The volta of this poem comes in the middle with the simile and refocuses on another moment.

"[...] as once my father / carried me from the car up the tacked carpet / to the white bed, and if I woke, I never knew it."  There's a very intimate moment of a childhood experience -- the speaker being carried up by their father.  I feel the adjectives of "tacked" and "white" bring a attentiveness to the speaker -- this exact place, this exact sound of it the speaker is remembering.  And with the last line there's this in between of sleeping and waking and not knowing or feeling the different levels of real.

So for me, the vague encompassing beginning contrasts the more intimate in-between state of the speaker. What matters when your eyes are closed looking for that sacred song to be with you.