Poem on a Color

Blue happens when white fails,
when periphery and distance ride
on weakened light, a dim permeation
through opaque lens suspended in a
milky shaded blue.

Blue happens when white fails,
like Dickinson’s last glance before
she could not see to see. A flash of
red begets motion without pain until
all becomes oblivi-bluest haze.

Blue happens when white fails.
My surgeon pulls the public badge.
Part silicon my blue eye patch
(only pirates and romantics prefer
black) yields without much fight.

Too bad the mind’s eye lacks a
soothing shield—no Murine for the
brain, no conscious means to blink.)

Blue happens when white fails.
Whiteness tears at cones and rods.
I hear the white and feel the flare
ignited by florescent tubes, then white
recedes to rippling incandescent blue.

Blue happens when white fails.
My mother’s body settles in the
bed, each faint heartbeat divorcing
oxygen and blood, demarcating livid blue:
the living and the dead.

The room grows dim.
The light recedes.
White fails. Blue remains.

The Pearl

Cousin Amy’s next door neighbor,
climbed in her bedroom window to take
with fear and blade what modesty denied
his hands and mouth. He carved breasts
and throat; he took her virtue piecemeal to
his house and sprawled her butchered carcass
on the lawn. When police had cleared the
scene, her brother John, and I went through
her house, to find an earring’s mate,

its match all Amy wore to meet the
coroner. We searched the table tops;
we dropped to hands and knees and
raked the thick shag pile. We traced
how violence moved —a shattered
German beer stein, splintered shreds
of wooden chair; Our hands became
our eyes, felt for what we could not
see, this sticky residue on palms and
pants as we tracked the signs of fight

into the bathroom. A smell of copper,
oxidized, rose from tub’s congealing
blood. Such silent work, for us: a single
fly disturbed the peace, its buzzing
wings percussed on window panes, an
insect guard ‘til we gave up the hunt.
Amy’s mother, wrecked, grieved,
and focused on that missing pearl,
did not forgive our empty-handedness.