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.
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.
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