Blue
“torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto’s dark-blue daze”
- Bovarian Gentians, D.H.Lawrence
I am too conscious of the plutonic blues
Levelled by September’s ending heels
Into snarls of darkness, immortalising
The fixations of mid-century poets.
Hand me a torch. Clasp me, owl-like, from sleep.
Cloak me in the reveries of earthworms
To prepare me for the metaphor of gentians
And the spectra they cannot articulate.
Cucurbita thicken with shortened days,
Oranges coagulating the darkness
Of blue-grey clay and leafless things.
I cannot believe how dark it is already,
Those dyes requited, as was asked of me;
Ingrained in the deodands of pumpkins.
These things are over-known. Plumbed too thoroughly.
One side of the moon is always dark.
Unmouthed shrieks of lepidoptera,
Fragrant as cannon smoke, rend this truth
And the unsought expectations of flight.
I can taste it on the wind, all disquiet,
The promise and the burden and the pitch.
My children and I are mutable air signs,
Filled by the East in dialects of swords.
Tradewinds sapored of Mercury, argent
Glooms and collocations of yellow,
Scatter the dross of our transit like cropseed,
Both dreamlike and those of flaked skin.
I am all of these things and none of these things.
Somehow, I am both too much and too little.
Let the crystals charge beneath a full moon
And ask me again behind the swan-stars
When sunsets have interred their great cross.
Feathered in X-rays I’m fearful I love
Like a black hole, incompatible
With time. There is no continuum
Where I can recuse the part of you
Superimposed on me, collapsing
Inwards and inwards, extricating navels
Into gravity wells quite unlike our hearts.
Sometimes our lives happen out of order.
Sometimes Autumn is recycled. Again I
Gut gourds like gutting the body of God,
Rummaging through unparsable viscera
For the scraps of things I like about myself,
Half-glimpsed in puddles, half-held in candle-glint;
A fair return for how you have hollowed me.
I will not take the Eucharist because I
know I am worthy. I cannot take the fruits
Of winter because I know my violations.
My penance is pushing the wheelbarrows
In full knowledge that belief is little more
Than ringing metal and snapping vines
And the knotted intensities of their castoff,
And the colour of colour beyond the blue.
But you don’t need to say you believe me.
And you don’t need to say that you will.
Hand me a torch. Hand me into the blueness.
