The Luz Azul Wild China Blues

                           “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
                            by the false azure in the windowpane...”

                                                             Vladimir Nabokov

Just between me and you

is it possible to find a language

of but one word—like blue:

the blue of sky?

the egg of a robin that wings red and gray

across its space?

the unseen face of a blue moon bounding month

or season or seen rising above a land of volcanoes

spewing ashes of a long dying poetry?

coming out of the blue, suddenly,

blue-eyed boy talking a blue streak,

shooting pigeons

  onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat

blue in the face like blood or ribbons,

collared blue, dressed to the nines in blue velvet?

a bolt, like a note microtonally out of pitch

from a bent string or double-reeded aulos or bagpipe

or klezmorim or wailing Arab flutters in quartertones?

or is it the blue flower--die blaue Blume—unreachable

in its infinity of passions and desires like bluebirds of wandering to and fro

youth?

Is it a rose blue from dye injected into its bark?

Sacré dieu! Sacrebleu! Morbleu! Par le sang de bleu! 

Is that the artifice of Victor Hugo's L’art c’est l’azure

or of Ruben Dario's reverie—Homeric, Hellenic—of prose and poetry

bounded by the River Ocean and circling an ancient world--of Este azul es lo mío?

Is it Oscar Wilde and  My Blue China?

Era su príncipe azul.

¿No te he dicho

que el azul no hay que tocar?

Why not and even if forgot or shallowly begot

why not too blue Berbers--circum cellas euntes—to wit, Donatist Circumcellions

wandering among North African Roman peasants, cancelling debt, anathematizing property

and slavery, prizing martyrdom, rightly turning the world upside down?

Blue-veined white skin and the wedding of something borrowed, something blue

(at high interest)?

Nel blu dipinto di blu?

Into the wild blue yonder?

The girl with the blue dress ON—Swedish ¾ and Jenny Lind, and when, exactly, does it come OFF?

Blue Christmas—Elvis lives!

Prussian blue? Electric blue? Blueprints? Blueberries? Blueflies? Bluebeards? Bluecoats? Blueballs?

Bluenose? Bluefin? Bluegills? Bluebells? Bluegrass? Blueing (bang!)? Bluet?

Bluestockings, true blue.

Bloody blue murder, skies and seas and streets filled with boys in blue and swearing, blue laws, blue chip robber barons,

Wittgenstein's Blue Book and very unfinal rhapsody:

This is a pencil, this is round, this is wood, this is one, this is hard...but:

this is not yellow—this is blues,

this is blue.

E. A. Costa

E. A. Costa December 29, 2016 Granada, Nicaragua