From Bluets, by Maggie Nelson
1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrement coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became somehow personal.
2. And so I fell in love with a color – in this case, the color blue – as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.
Bluet
Everything that separates us is white:
Snow-capped mountains,
foamy ocean waves that pull up to the shore,
sunlight so pristine it fades the colors out of the prism,
time zones printed across maps of the continents,
longing and distance and the airy cotton sheet
that flutters down on my belly
when I shake it out over me.
Everything that connects us is blue:
Forget-me-nots and touch-me-nots,
stellar’s jays at the feeder,
sunbirds in your bower,
a teardrop stone in a ring that married me to you, even though I never told you,
smooth sea glass and a shawl around my shoulders and someone else’s poetic confession about falling in love with a color,
the way the morning light bathes my bedroom
as our bodies awaken one another.
In the minutes before words settle themselves down on this page
to whisper secrets I wouldn’t dare speak,
I know, finally, what it is I want to say to you.
I drift and float in the pure white space of this poem before it is written,
the lingering allure of azure,
blue enough to drift off in contentment
blue enough to surrender to safety,
blue enough to know I am home and not home,
blue enough to recognize that while she fell in love with a color,
I fell in love with you.
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With gratitude for Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (2009, Wave Press) and your bower filled with blue found objects.