Another Poem on Blue

ANOTHER POEM ON BLUE

Can I help it that I keep writing
the same poem over & over again?
No more than I can help being
reborn into this world
a million times every instant,
a luxury so prolonged & painful
that I'm unable to adequately
prepare for it before, during, or after.
Nevertheless, I apologize,
not only to any reader
who's already suffered
my previous poems on this color,
but also to Picasso's famous Blue Period,
Lawrence's "Bavarian Gentian,"
that "blue, forked torch of a flower,"
Dylan's "Tangled Up in Blue"—
it's impossible to list them all,
so let this serve as a blanket apology
to every one of the world's living & dead
blue virtuosos—except the author of
"Love is Blue," a scratched-up single
I played a dozen times every night
during the first few months of seventh grade
as I wept, ostensibly
over the unshakeable indifference
of my lab partner Arthur Farrell,
though what I was actually beginning to suffer
was my own newly-discovered strangeness,
still moist & raw, not yet grown into its wing span—
I'm still a little embarrassed
to admit how I loved that song,
despite the fact that I've long since realized
the entire purpose of seventh grade
is to raise up a standard of shame,
self-reproach, & psychospiritual devastation
no other epoch could hope to equal.
But this blue I'm compelled to glorify—
it's not robin's egg, navy, or indigo;
it's a shade that should be named "devastation blue,"
the excruciating, lacerative blue of today's sky
whose incandescence suggests
that its nearest blood kin is neither
violet nor emerald, but gold—
this blue must be gold's daughter,
the flame inside the flood,
the flood inside the wind,
the wind inside the flame,
the very reason we've all been tiptoeing around
in a state of perpetual pre-emergency,
as if in hard hats, anticipating tremor
& tremor's aftermath,
the cataclysmic release from above
of everything heaven would hold back no longer,
though whether in grief or relief, no one could know.
But if only we'd bothered to glance around us,
if only we'd observed all those cumulonimbi heaping up
in even the shallowest of parking lot puddles,
if only we'd noticed the ever-expanding population
of the broken-winged, both avian & human,
maybe we would have deduced earlier
that never has the sky not been falling
from every direction, from every dimension,
above, beneath, between, within,
as if all along, even from the very beginning,
there's been some kind of unspeakable rending
at the heart of things,
some tear, some irreversible breaking open,
because look! Every living thirst is drinking!
Half-hidden between porch bricks,
the striped gecko flicks its forked tongue
at the freshness, then drinks;
the wild birds with their hooked & curved & serrated beaks
drink from leafcurl, from river,
& from the air, in flight;
even the stones drink,
taking in the sweetness
through their slick & shiny
or rough & grainy skins
as stones were born to do,
though it's not enough for them—
their flinty molecules long for more,
so because the International Law of Stones compels them
to continue until they're quenched,
all of them, from the softest talc to the most impenetrable diamond,
are breaking open with loud sighs
that astonish no one more than themselves
as they begin to drink from the inside out,
guzzling supercharged, supersaturating blue
straight from their split heartcores.
You know those kinds of sighs that smolder
with all the other exhalations seeping bluely
through the world's every chink, crack,
fracture, perforation,
any place where the edges
don't come together anymore,
the ripped meridian, the ruptured vein,
exactly the kind of landscape you'll need to visit
if you want to drink from the headwaters—
& not visit only;
once you've located such a wound,
you'll want to enter,
no matter how swiftly
it flickers in & out of sight.
Inside, you'll find there's room to unfurl
your baby or grown-up wings,
your fastidious or blundering wings,
your blushing, drowned, or glissando wings,
your blistered, bandaged, or lightly iced-over wings—
unfurl them as far as they'll go, or farther,
& fly around in enormous circles, figure 8's,
rhomboids, hexadexadrons, helioglobes,
any shapes your particular wings might invent,
fly until your lungs are drinking,
your bones are drinking
even the roots of your hair are drinking
from that unstaunchable
hemmorhage of blue.

© by Claire Bateman Published in Valparaiso Poetry Review and CLUMSY (New Issues, Western Michigan University, 1993).