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6 Jan: "Blue" by Carl Phillips

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.

2 comments:

  1. Is this about domestic violence?

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  2. I'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.

    I 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.

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