Blue
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As through marble or the lining of
certain fish split open and scooped
clean, this is the blue vein
that rides, where the flesh is even
whiter than the rest of her, the splayed
thighs mother forgets, busy struggling
for command over bones: her own,
those of the chaise longue, all
equally uncooperative, and there’s
the wind, too. This is her hair, gone
from white to blue in the air.
This is the black, shot with blue, of my dark
daddy’s knuckles, that do not change, ever.
Which is to say they are no more pale
in anger than at rest, or when, as
I imagine them now, they follow
the same two fingers he has always used
to make the rim of every empty blue
glass in the house sing.
Always, the same
blue-to-black sorrow
no black surface can entirely hide.
Under the night, somewhere
between the white that is nothing so much as
blue, and the black that is, finally; nothing,
I am the man neither of you remembers.
Shielding, in the half-dark,
the blue eyes I sometimes forget
I don’t have. Pulling my own stoop-
shouldered kind of blues across paper.
Apparently misinformed about the rumored
stuff of dreams: everywhere I inquired,
I was told look for blue.
Is this about domestic violence?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure. The gutting a fish and knuckles sounds violent, and it reads like the dad could have killed the mother figure. But the white and dark comparison could be the influence of interracial parents.
ReplyDeleteI looked up the poet, he is openly gay. That could have something to do with not being remembered.
Blue and blues are sad. This poem is sad. Is the narrator looking for blue because the person is a poet, gay, biracial, or depressed? Or is blue a symbol for something else?
Lots to interpret here.