Kind of Blue

1. The promise of creativity flows like rain pebbling the roof of the study where your untidy poems lay. A glance backward sweeps the world: as rotund as an orange, as blue as the books we pack in refrigerated boxes. A deep cyan, dark as night, settles over the city. Indigo streets, limned avenues. Dreams encased in dreams. 2. Waters wash over me, a placid azure stitched with strands of maroon and gray. I marvel at them in autumn on the streets of Scotland, blood-red moon ascending over Edinburgh’s castle. Black, black sky, the fingerprints of God pressed onto burnt-out suns. Novas, nuevas, née mort. I would tally the containers, but the abacus is broken. All numbers equal nine. Aquamarine brings green to bear on the equation. 3. Salt seeps through the hollows of walls, the room interrogates itself in pools of seaweed, soft- shelled crabs, angular gulls. You know the ocean’s rhyme, but the meter is skewed, the skewer heavy with charbroiled fish. No plates, forks. Sea reflects sky reflects sea reflects a kind of blue, exonerates my mood. Trumpet trills shrink the shallow hue of veins. Blood pumps blue pumps red pumps life on the cathedral steps. O-negative breaks positive. I will sweep up the pieces, paint them steely blue.