Man . . . carries the stars in himself . . .
—Paracelsus
How would we explain it? Would we
point to the calyxes of bluets
growing wild in the spring ditches,
or give the obligatory nod
to our catch-pennied history:
Boudicca, shoulders stained indigo
before marching to Camulodunum—
now Colchester—butchering
the Roman Ninth? Or would we look
to science: each jeweled corpuscle
skittering the walls of Newton’s simple
Trinity flat (Rose madder, Celandine,
the sweet bassoon-like notes of Vitrum)
a choir of photons harmonizing
its approximation of April’s
hundred greedy mouths? And how
to explain its duplicity: not just cobalt,
phthalo, (etc.)—but Blue the Obtuse,
Obliquely Blue? Consider the shadows
falling over Hopper’s Lighthouse Hill,
the lambent air of Route 6, Eastham,
then explain the incongruous beauty
of bruises rising like juniper berries
in thin milk, or their burning retreat—
like stars!—into the arm’s pink flesh.
This is how I would explain it: Memphis.
Not the garish arcadia of vaulted pilaster
storefronts along Beale, stripped and hung
like masks, the slack-mouthed-sum
white dream of urban renewal—
but the Memphis of memory
it should’ve become, overrun
with saw-toothed heroes, like Dante’s
first ring of Hell proper: in Frayser,
bells ring back the departed & Specht’s
smoldering stones emerge as warm fists
of rye; & into the immaculate aisles
of Saunders automated store the poor
push through the glistening turnstiles.
At the river De Soto discovers
he’ll only be passing though,
& once a year from the bluffs
we watch the handsome men leave
their boats ashore to swim out,
touch the steamer’s hull. Everyone
has Universal Life. The viburnum
is truly remarkable. And there—
in front of the Loraine—King lies, face up
(not the King, who resides one level down—
but KING) sunning by the pool. Clouds
like pretty waitresses and eager
Gibson girls pass—they’ve come
for the dancing, which is good here,
our guitars strung with fireflies.
Even Washburn’s captured pants
experience a reversal of sorts, hung up
among the constellation of vulgar gods,
their motto scrawled in blue spray paint
behind Beale Street Baptist: BEWARE
DOGMA’S BITE (leave it to the poet to lead us
straight to hell). Blue is the suffering of light,
Goethe said, the beautiful body defiled;
our friends, joy and pathos, the opposable
thumbs of the universe. It is King
in the Mason Temple; martial law after.
It’s those stars, a million desolate atoms
dithering in our hematope, pulsing:
Mem-phis Mem-phis Mem-phis
There are some four hundred references
to the heavens in Old Testament,
yet not one mention of their particular blue.
Tragedies are stirring in their baskets.
Imagine the first to discover sky: What
eloquence did he contrive for the expanse,
for the perfect distress of it—what word?
