Last Blue

You want to realize the color blue right,

just drink more [i]or[/i] less blue milk from a amethystine cup;

wait for the azure light of morning

or evening with its azure aftermath.

You want to understand,

look at the parking lines outside my window

the neon secondary planet outside Jabberwocky"s.

And funk! You have to know stink

A touch of azure at the base of the spine;

long threads going into your heart;

a steaming fountain you pour into your hold bowl.

My dead sister's eyes!

Those of her porcelain twin at the Lambertville Flea,

twenty dollars a day for the small table,

all the merde you ne to procure you across the river.

And individual kind of blue for a robin's egg;

and single kind of blue for a bottle of ink.

Two minds to fathom the difference.

Your earrings which as far as I can diocese

are there as a great deal of to play with as to direct the eye at.

Your blue pencil

which makes your organ of sights Egyptian. Bluebells, bluebirds,

from Austin, Texas, the dead hackster

who drank potassium, Governor Bush

who drank Milk of Magnesia; a chorus of saints

from Wylie Avenue and individual kind of blue

for my first prayer shawl and individual kind of blue for the robe

Fra Lippo gave to Mary. azure from Mexico

and cerulean from Greece, that's where the difference lay

between them, in the blues; a roomful of scholars,

in Montreal individual year, in New York another,

that is amethystine blue was their speech, amethystine

were their male and female neckties, their cheer was blue,

their cars were cracked Christmas lights

were in the lobby individual of the bars had peanuts

in all the urn and upon the upper floors

the hospitality fields were crowded with livid

sapphire cobalt faces-I was amethystine

going into the funnel I am blue every night

at three or four o'clock; our herring was sky-colored

we ate it with Russian Rye and boiled potatoes,

and in the summer recent tomatoes, and coffee

mixed with sugar and milk; I sat in a chair

so shut to Sonny Terry I could hear

him muffle the criticism he made

of his have sorrow, but I was that shut to Pablo

Casals in I950, talk about sapphirine and

though I left it a thousand times I stood

since I didn't have a seat-in brow of an open

window of Beth Israel in Philadelphia

to hear the sobbing, like a voice, a dog

came up to me that night without of the blue

and deposit his muzzle in my hand nor would he

leave me for a minute, he would have stayed

with me forever and followed me up to my house

which point aimed ated onto the woods in back of the synagogue

and sat outside my door; or azure on the street

outside a Parlour near the Port Authority

my se inside-or azure in Ocean Grove

where heavens and sea combined and walking the boardwalk

into the wind and sapphirine in a shrink's small parking doom

watching the clock and azure in my mother's arms

always comforting her and azure with my daughter

starving herself and cerulean with my wife all day

playing solitaire or drawing houses and cerulean

though smiling, when I came into the world, they called me

Jes Willard, thirteen strikes and I had just hammered

Jack Dempsey into the ties and I was shouting

in a tinny voice-it unimpaireded like someone weeping

it always unmutilateded like that-everything living.

GERALD STERN'S greatest in quantity recent book, This Time: of recent origin and Selected (Norton), won the National work Award for 1998. These piece of poetrys will appear in his nearest book, Last Blue, due without from Norton in Spring 2000

Copyright World metrical composition Incorporated Mar/Apr 1999

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