81. Une bleue d’or

It is in the blue of it that it is not there,
the sense of the color as blue, as a color encompassing
the sea and the air, a color of such depth
in the shade of it that it is completely unnatural
in its naturalness, and that is what we yearn for,
the color, as blue, but bluer, and darker, a blue
we might dream of, but which we would
never expect to see.

I’ve had a fifth of a fifth of bourbon tonight,
or thereabouts, but brown doesn’t inhabit me
as blue does. The shock of the cold of blue pulls me down,
pulls me under, back under the water, as
when I fell through the ice into Lake Erie
to be inhabited by cold, the world as it is,
relentless, emotionless, tearing
into my soft pink flesh.

IKB is the color, deep in the sense of dark,
dredging the dark edges of blue for whatever
is still blue, and tells us something about
itself, ourselves. We yearn for this blue,
its color, the steady gaze of it back at us, the way
it represents for us the color of shadow
without actually being that shade.

The beauty of the monochrome. Choose a color.
Stick with it. Find what that color can do
in various contexts. But find the right color.
It can be IKB, which has no value
except as it represents the world, or the full
emptiness around us: the heaviness of the ocean
surrounding all of our footsteps, the apparent weightlessness
of the sky waiting to turn to a darker shade of blue.

Or there is the separation of the eye
into gold: first as flecks then
color as sheen as texture as certain metal
and the worth of it. Dans le plénitude du vide,
je sens une mine d’or fin. Everywhere, everywhere,
there is nothing or the sense of nothingness,
and that thought fills us with the richest pleasures,
of sight, of touch, of thinking the buttery
taste of gold.

The content of sight is a distribution
of taste over the tongue. Blue is a feminine
color against the lips, warm because we
cannot feel the depth of it, or it descends into
an eye, into the veins, the hint of blue
just under the skin, an ocean of blue
pumped through a body (dark deep cold
blue) to keep a body warm and moving
in space, as an object of space and perception,
an object of desiring, the wanting of
that certain color of a certain
thing at that certain point of a day’s
light, and how it feels in the heart,
or ruptures.

All the red blood
that runs out the body like water, that
splashes to the ground, that soaked into my shirt
when my head was hit open with a club, that
covers my brother with the sheen of fresh blood
when a knife opened his head from a spot
on Barbados with a broad arcing view
of the Caribbean with its bands of
ultramarine never quite reaching Yves
Klein’s blue, a red blood that rolls
in a sheet over the glass table top,
that pulls and repels us with its deep color, that seeps
into the concrete sidewalk, that dries
to the color of scab, dark and red and
almost brown.

I’ve had a fifth of a fifth of bourbon,
and my mind is clear, and I can taste
the sweet smooth fabric of the liquor
across my tongue, and the night is so late it’s
morning, and I am possessed by
the color of the night, the russet trees of night
under the yellow streetlights, the color
of eyes, the color of breath when
breath leaves the body invisibly, the color
of each thought of a finger placed on a page,
letter by letter, the color of lips that speak,
the color of lips in silence, the dark black color
of the void and the searing white
of that same void.