Blue

Part #2 of the Color Triptych

Then I wandered for centuries

past ice-blue towers,

sapphire mountains ringed by shifting sand seas.

Your voice still murmured when I trapped my ear against the dirt.

Your voice swimming the currents of underground rivers.

I saved you- from yourself, from my love- as devouring as the ocean, crushing everything to a fine blue silt. So why would you haunt me?

Finally, I came to a place that held me. A graveyard, outside a small village by the sea.

Blue headstones, chalky cliffs, water rippling black below. I howled into the swell.

I lay in the damp stone sepulcher. The waves broke all night: attack and retreat, attack and retreat.

In the morning, the gravedigger found me shivering. Mute, he jibbered to gulls and mollusks, spoke the language of the sea. A fine mist covered us, blue pounding the rocks below. He licked the top of my spine, traced all the places I’m jointed together, made the sign of the cross over every hinge. My bones white-hot in my flesh.

The visions I saw when he buried himself in me: armies colliding, corpses rising from the oceans, ghost ships drifting on cerulean seas. He tasted of brine, of pebbles on the ocean floor.

In town I re-discovered things I’d forgotten. Neon-lights in a box. Wine staining my mouth violet. The way it felt after you loved a man, to stick the knife in.

Indigo clots dripped from between my legs; pain turned me inside-out. Another spirit died and rotting.

Summer came. I prepared myself for battle. Crushed the violet graveyard flowers into powder. Dyed my body cyanide-blue.

On nights when the water was calm, I lurked in the shallows of a nearby beach, calling to the drunken men who stumbled along the shore. Further and further out I swam, along the cliff edge. Moonlight caressed me, lit my body milky-blue. And the men followed. I knew caves to hoist myself into; I knew the places of safety and danger. The water took them all, some quietly, some screaming and thrashing and cursing me.

I couldn’t stand the gravedigger’s tenderness; it hurt me in a place I couldn’t name. Maybe it made me think of you. One day we swam out so far, I could barely see the cliffs in the distance. I held his head under the waves, submerged his gentle protests, why, why, why. I barely made it back to shore. I was tempted to let the waves take me too.

Finally, the people from town came for me. They didn’t hang me from a tree, though I begged and pleaded. They didn’t set me on fire.

They confined me to the graveyard, to tend the weeds and talk to the dead. My tongue tasted ash, mouth a sealed tomb. Heaven closed off to me forever.

The sea slowly ate the cliff, the earth receded and crumbled. I saw fishermen drowned, their children grown up and drowned, their children’s children disappearing beneath the waves. The few that ocean didn’t take found other ways to die. In the ossuary, I tended their bones. Softly as a mother looking after her babes.

After many centuries, I died too, cradling the bones I loved. The villagers buried me deep.

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