Ps. 88.1-2 (between the cry)

O Yhwh / the God of my salvation (1)
daily / I cry out / for help (2)
nightly / I am before you. (3)
Let my prayer /come to your attention (3a)
bend your ear / to my cry of distress (2a). 

It is probably the bleakest psalm in the psalter. But there is a very instructive reason for this—it is probably the closest a psalmist will ever get to speaking from the realm of death. As such it reveals a profound experience of what exactly death entails. One thing we will note as we proceed is an agonizing dialectic within the experience of the psalmist. His language and imagery will frighteningly oscillate between images of terrible proximity and painful distance, of overpowering constriction and utter abandonment. It is this sense of irreconcilable and permanent duplicity that is the ‘state of Sheol’. It is not, in other words, that the closer he gets to Sheol the closer he gets to a place of unity and integrity (however awful it may be); rather, this experience on the ‘verge of Sheol’ reveals to us that Sheol (potentially) is a place of a permanent dividing dissolution. This can begin to be fleshed out in the opening lines. 

The formal arrangement of these opening lines is instructive. The first line speaks to Yhwh as the psalmist’s “God of my salvation.” He then narrates to Yhwh what he (the psalmist) does and then moves into petition. What is interesting to note is the chiastic structure. He daily “cries out” (2) and then petitions that Yhwh “bend his ear to my cry” (2a). He nightly is “before you” (3) and then petitions that his prayer “come to your attention” (3a). We are already, in this very simple structure, introduced to a major theme of the psalm—the psalmist’s sense of a profound disconnect between his actions and Yhwh’s. It is as if a chasm existed between the two. The psalmist is torn between his hope that Yhwh will cross the chasm and his fear that he may have already entered into that realm (or state of being) ‘forgotten’ by Yhwh (“cut off from your hand”).