blue & blue, borax & sugar, holes & roses

prussian blue toenails=ready for spring break

blue can be blue

or blue can be bright

or sky or lake or sea or eye or

lupine or vein or lace or dead or

sadhappy, the color of the arterial 

roadway to our heart

& so it is my color for the season

for the series of juxtapositions 

we live whether or not

we believe in it

all is soft

*

tights giveaway winners, selected by one of our illustrious guest bloggers, are:

-christine-chioma--blue roses

&

-sunshine christiensen--holey black

one of you will receive a punkish pair of holey black tights, the other a fine meshed blue rose garden for your legs.

maybe some day you'll want to get together and trade.

mixing the hard and the soft is always good, even if you don't believe in the hard and the soft,

but rather think that 

all is soft. 

 

*

from the poetry foundation website:

Common Blue

Common Blue
 by Melissa Kwasny
 

Their eggs are laid on lupine. Tiny jade

hairstreaks I could easily mistake for dew.

Too precious. Too incidental,

and besides that, blue, these trills that flounce

in my potato patch, drawn

from dryland origins to the domestic

stain of water from my hose.

What an old woman would study, I think

as you hand me the guidebook, distracted

by the replica of a parasol

growing out of a bleached cow pie.

The Siamese kitten with his butterfly eyes

comes running, his mouth full

of swallowtail, his breath smelling of borax

and sugar I have poured

over the ant hills in the garden.

He is young and intent on eating poison.

We bushwhack through Paradise,

what is there to say except to lament

the daily evidence of its passing.

How the common blues scatter from my shade.

And you, so fragile, so sick, so thin,

your diet restricted, keep pointing out

the bearded face of larkspur.

When the angels fell, a fifteenth-centruy bishop says,

there were 133, 306, 668 of them.

It takes us all afternoon to cross the field.

The body, it is so sad what happens to it.

If you fell, you would dry up instantly.

But these are not angel wings

who disguise themselves as leaf or shred of bark,

who are named after the stops

in meaning our language must make room for:

the comma whose wings look battered,

or the violet underside of the question mark.

To keep the mind from clenching, you say,

is the main thing. Even the most

beautiful days always seem to have death in them.

As Valentinus said; our fall into love and sleep.

You especially like the dark alpines

with their furred bodies and lack of marking.

And the sulphurs, yellowed scraps that fall

from a myth of origin that doesn’t include us.

When we find them, we will wonder

who is still alive. We speak of our souls with such

surface ease. But who will take such care for us?

You bend and bend to the scrappy blue sea,

your back turned to the moon fluttering above you.

I have been thinking so much of strength

this week, yours and mine, I mean,

the field of attention that can be strengthened.

*

legwear: bare

inspiration:  janet mcadam's daily poetry prompt "the art of losing" at book balloon

looking forward:  to greeting the saguaro cacti waving to us along the road on our way to az.