Blue Child In Motion

 "Blue...songs are like tattoos / you know, I've been to sea before" --Joni Mitchell "Blue"

When I was a child, I learned
that not much falls from a blue sky.
Bored by the blandly pretty and never satisfied,
I waited on storms like rescuers.

When I was a child I tossed
my minnow-thoughts to gulls I alone could see. 
By the cold waters of Lake Superior one summer,
I listened for my native tongue from every shell.

Later, I'm not sure I saw myself or my spouses at all
through the bottle glass I blew with every word.
From inside whales and outside of any map,
I did find saving grace in my own restless nature.

Now, it comes to me with the red sky at night,
that the Argo and the Dutchman fly
with my childhood gulls, and if I seem melancholy or far away,
it is because I am, and have always been

this blue child in motion on the electric air of my imaginings.
__________

for The Sunday Muse #61.

Pottery Of Ancient Cultures

In your eyes,

the pottery of ancient cultures.

From your smile,

sunspots

that leave vervet monkeys sitting, perplexed

At the breath-thinness of a peasant blouse

reclining between August stars 

and the skin of your shoulder. 

They find, in every stitch and design,

a catalog of figs, and vertigo.

They are drunk

on the ferment of your lazy accent.

At the Museum of Utilitarian Wonders,

I find

the pottery of ancient cultures.

A brochure contains the beginnings of nests

for birds who do not exist--

vervets who do not exist--

drunk under a sun hidden by clouds.

I clasp ancient ornaments onto your wrists,

your throat,

your ankle,

but your body is clouds.

You cannot accept these gifts, or anything else--

Just rain,

love,

colors,
reversed images,

that do not exist except in the singular attentions

of these useless lines.

_____