by Linda Mills Woolsey
When I consider the buzz of feeding on nectar, the bluebottle’s heady dazzle, azure to rival even the dragonfly’s, I want to rise in praise of being.
But grief’s body is thick, awkward, its spiky legs pick their way across the compost’s wilted kale-blue scraps of memory.
The bluebottle lays her nectar-infused eggs on corpses, helping the rot along.
This morning a lone bluebottle rickets along the sill as I ponder blue: from robin’s egg to the raised veins on the mottled backs of my hands.
Eyes, too, in variations–from aquamarine of the sea at Sounion to Carrara’s slabs, nearly gray. It’s sad how seldom I’ve really noticed.
Today I’m about as blue as a mixing bowl, a denim skirt, a velvet sleeve, my own personal blue beyond violets, sixties’ eyeshadow, the sad-eyed sound of Elvis’s voice.
I am sinking into a ripe blue– vat of concord grapes, bowl of prune plums, July’s blackberries ripening on their canes.
I stir blue like a bottle of ink, a tub of bluing, a kettle of jam bubbling on a hot stove. I can feel it hardening—the old blues of iron bridges, my wrecked Nova, dressmaker’s pins clenched between my mother’s pursed lips.
My heart is lapis, cobalt, indigo, glass. Any day now it will shatter like a bottle of Blue Nun or a jar of Noxzema–pieces jagged, scattered, sinking in sorrow’s wine-dark swells.
Maybe, if I’m lucky, they’ll toss and turn till anguish smooths solid, heaves back on the sand in mermaid tears, bright as doll’s eyes in the salt spray,
drying to a gauzy bluebottle glitter as the sun fingers them. Maybe they’ll rise, jewel-winged, flutter in Icarus clouds against a slate blue sky—
Ulysses, Blue Morpho, Common Blue.
Linda Mills Woolsey’s poems have appeared in Anglican Theological Review, The Cresset, Christian Century, Coal Hills Review, Relief, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review and other journals. A native of Western Pennsylvania and Emeritus Professor of English at Houghton College, she lives in Rushford, NY with her husband, two cats and a comforting stash of books.
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