Best Poems from "Belief Blues" by Kay Murphy

"In a sixties song this would make a kind of sense/ but since then music and I have fallen sick/ of looking for meaning in coincidence."

"Wake up this morning with blues behind my eyes/ Wake up this morning I have to intellectualize/ Think of all the why nots, think of all the whys"

"... or leave jagged and gray as Wednesday's ashes, / all their penises... This is surely before the Fall and Shame when I/ am looking for you and my ad in the personal reads:/ No false morals... At the Vatican I want to see Christ's genitals/ before he is dead, but find infant two-dimensional one... They don't bear the eyes of this new One/ who would turn my thighs to veined marble, inseparable/ as blood from flesh, until, with a light/ this concrete, he'd split, and penetrate."

"Now we understand, we don't want to die,/ we want to flap our lives wildly/ in the midst of such glorious light,/ as madmen often do,/ as those who paint the stars with such love must."

"He was faithful by then, too, but that/ is beside the point. In the same way, I suppose,/ that Tess was or was not beside him/ before those stars over Vermont/ turned on us all."