Unsung Blues

I heard your eyes were blue before we met.

Yes, blue, the village whispered, right and wrong.

Blue was their righteous sibilant refrain –

Insistent yet inaudible to me.

They never saw that dazed obsidian orb,

Effulgent, swell within its sapphire womb

Involuntary black as Rhondda coal

Dark as the day that hides behind the moon.

Not arctic stars in midnight Prussian seas

Or cobalt clouds, nor living peacock things

Or slate of memory; berries, birds or flowers,

Or indigo December, dark with rime.

They never saw those lucent frost-white lids

Sweep over Celtic secrets, swift as swans,

And drop, as azure nightfall drops from light

Like sleep’s descent on this once-ancient land.

But yes — those eyes are blue — I give them that:

The blue of bruises; blood stopped in the veins.

The blue that buries music in the throat.

That breathless, baby blue of unborn song.

And when I kissed the back of your mute neck,

(satin like babies; leather like worn men)

In Wales, before the judges and the sheep,

You closed your eyes in pleasure and in pain.

I learned then, and can never unlearn, why

That wool-rich song of you arose and fell,

And why they whisper “blue” to strangers; but…

When will you breathe, my troubadour, my Wales?

When will you (will you? will you? when?) be born?

________

Harrison Solow 2005