Fury Psalm 6:

Let there be a God, an earth, seasons weathered through a time
for this, for that, for breathing and for holding one’s breath.

Let there be seasons when the moon has nothing to be sad about
Let there be seasons of radial sheaves of your hair, filaments that burn

and rise out of the ash and turn mine your lost red.
For I pray that Mama, good doctor, will find rest after my yelling

her name on the corner of Center and Main, Midway
and Edgewater, Twin Pine and Butterfield.

Let there be seasons of hay and soybean, of corn shucking
and country drives that don’t wheel me back into brooding.

For you are one labyrinthine tangle, leaving me
breathing water, blue razor rusting my throat.

Let the wooden room I live in hold more books.
Let them not fall open to another line of elegy.

For the prophets say, to live is death, and to die
is also death: first shadow, then pallor of clouds.

Let there be a heaven that merges seasons and sidewalks,
For she prays that her night will be a small closed path

and dies before the wheels of my jet touch down.

Fury Psalm 11:

Because she had outlived five births, one cancer, four moves, two falls, and her own
ambition, her own designing, her own small-breasted desires kept in the dark room

“No” is all the gut has to repudiate the scythed and hooded claim:
She has come through the voyage fit. She is nourished by darkness now.

No, she is done with putting bones into place, but I am not done
with my unfitting fit. It can’t be true that she has become sun-dried, shoreless,

For she is the dangerous hill and I am a climber lost on such a passage.

Bookshelf Chronicle: May-Summer 2017 (A History of Guess & Check)

I find just 15 seconds without sorrow,
without conscientious thinking,
where the underworld scalds
objects from a borrowed confession:

the autumn kill, the classroom’s January
children, the lighthouse for the drowning,
yes, the history that just happened.
How, then, to get over running out

in the dreadful wind and rain
or under the weight of light
on a clear day when water and salt
meet the vanishing point?

Like so many before me, I go to find
the lost book of the Grail, an urn
of guess and check, of those who see
the deep and still go on.

I am not searching for Sappho
or Magdalene or even the secret
life of lost songs, but a mother’s
tale that begins, “I liked you better

before I knew you so well.” There’s a pain-
woman who takes my keys and I don’t
know the art of the field—is it middle
America or Patagonia—some tundra

where the trembling answers are rowing
inland, as if, in June, the labyrinth becomes
the echo of ice letting go. But, it’s not June,
and the ordinary trauma of burning

leaves testifies to the way gravity
changes us and how we behave the way
beasts behave, stuck in a foreign land. 
But listen:  don’t try for home or to save

its now graphic history. Instead, let’s build
a new city with a new anatomy, without
blood sports. Let’s put this world,
like an ex’s heart, in a jar, tinged yellow,

not red, under the lighted haloes of night.
It’s clear now, our game is to decipher
the nomad letters without that handy
answer book. Remember how we said,

when I grow up, I want to be a list
of further possibilities? Let’s breathe
through the boundaries of this pilgrimage
and place alpine needles across the breach.

Bookshelf Chronicle: September 2018 (A History of Unraveling Signs)

These are the Cape Hope blues, the shell games
that never cease, the borrowed forms inventing

lone star rhetorics, another symbolic exchange
that offers no guide to its unraveling signs,

meaning the true measure of the self
could just as well be the size of a yellow

moving van. And where are we moving
when it’s a side-bend world now, and we’ve lost,

in the beehive, clues from the animal
kingdom. We’ve refused premonitions.

We’ve made the climate of opinion
a permanent exhibit, a cairn, an icon.

Maybe others will discover and call it
“The Official Report on Human Activity.”

Let some stiff put it all into “Notes from the Fog
on Public Land” or “Rehearsal for a 4:30 Movie

Paid for with Plasma.” If we had A Pocket Guide
to Another Earth or better instruments for this

everyday domain, and, if I could lie
to you, I would.