The Song of the Color Blue

Look at the way I pour down the back
of a colt glazed in its own placenta,

staggering, the nuzzle and tongue-lick,
brushstrokes on a horse's neck.

I splatter frocks that float
across studios and quiet hospitals.

I lock up the landscape in sleep
and slip into the wake of an incense boat

that winds down a river,
a river that snakes and spills

from capillaries, its flow leached
of oxygen, slack with silt.

I vein the margins in old paperbacks
as a reminder or suggestion

or the crux of an ongoing argument
in someone's head: distorted

statues, St. Petersburg, 1866:
Raskolnikov plugging his ears

while beneath his window
a man flogs a horse in the street.

Now forget the crux of the argument
for a while, and watch me fall

from the crest of an axe-swing
in two shadows that tryst on a wall.

Here is a sketch in a nook on a monk's page:
Look at the way he inked me

into cerulean wolves starving under a semi-moon,
moon like a chrysalid, folded and dreamless,

or a cochlea, or a shell
with a stairwell coiled inside.

I climb to the snub end of the meridian
and bless the heads of swans

and some of the smaller, nameless
birds before they fly southernly,

and when winter shrouds
the hills like the hood of an anorak,

taste the lick of the comet
and the nebular touch of my fingers

and my blue blue hair that trails across your face
when your eyelids lastly go still.

Originally published in The Chattahoochee Review