Silhouettes of Blue

Silhouettes of Blue

Veins are sheaths of blood but not blood proper

                                                                (unless you’re

an octopus and more certainly still under the at once steady

and then not at once pressure of copper and of water)

maybe I want to say that the veins are in some way

the same as the veins of my mother

                                                who became

maybe in her last days became a lodestone (they’re

a hue of blue, no?) for addicts and fanatics

                                                or if not that than a grinding

                stone where if she’s come up as some kind of idle,

                a bluebottle say, that can ride and ffffffffzzzzphzzzzz        hide

                and sometimes fly

                because they’re never idle ffffffzzzzzbzzzzzzzffffzzzz

                when they’re alive

                                                it comes that as they light

                                and glide/slide on the thick lip slick with gibberish side

                                aligning the stroke side of her left eye

                                I’d try to see like one or even some of them

how there was then suddenly

                                five and counting

each against my mind’s palm

my thumb touching

my talon touching

my tongue

to take me back

                                                                to the page I’m studying

                which is my mother

                who is my other limb

                or maybe simply

                my other thumb

                stuck against the sticky bun

                my tongue as become

                after the hammer’s come

and is cephalopod dumb

with pain and the ungainly

stum

ble                                         how I’d absently swung

the hammer of memory

down without

really telling                        myself                  I was still

there and it was all the gravity and grace I had Jesus

I can’t even tell you when the news came she was found blue and going

bluer

on the bathroom tiles

what I was then was two pieces of pine and I was the ballpeen

hammer or I was another sort the one with the claw

I was sending each to a meeting together

and after

long after I’ll say of the way blue

looked inn her when she was all through

it wasn’t

the kind of blue I’d ever like, I knew,

in my life

but a different blue, edging the spectrum into a hue

of cyan blue the shade of some

octopuses and  I’ll say

it’s the feeling of it I want at night just

beneath the swell

of the getting tight shock of her dying like

that and how in the light

of some kinds darks I’ve known

                                                there comes some fragile shadow

                like cut-

paper silhouettes

the ones that want me

to be reminded that before flashes

                                of light inevitably charred and oxidized

                                                                all of my life

                                before there was a

way to settle the negative

                                spaces of blue

                                                                in the dark rooms and keep them in my cooo

we’d have our quiet caresses

and the hardstone cameos of our own slanting glances,

and every drop of our reconciling

want was razed from the shade to the fingerprint arches, loops, and whirls

how yours went black to blue-to every furnace hue,

how for a moment you were the very

color of our last grab, our final possession,

the pressure of four fingers and swelling head of a thumb left hovering

under the skin of the mother I want

to pack cool clean peat upon

while her old bruises splay and migrate and stray

like furiously stirred water going whirlpool mindless

and then, just like that, just because it has to,

settling like calm, like shy and soft shelless

mollusks tucking under their dependable eight, waiting.