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Half  awake, I was imagining a friend’s young lover, her ash blonde hair, the smooth taut skin of  twenty. I imagined her short legs and dimpled knees. The door scraped open, but eyes closed, I saw nothing. The mattress sagged. She laid her head on my chest, and murmured love against my throat, almost humming, approaching song, so palpable I could hold her only chastely, if  this was chaste. I couldn’t move my hand even to caress her freckled shoulder. So this is how imagination works, I thought, sadly. And when at last she spoke, she spoke with the amused voice of my wife, my wife who was at work but also here, pleased at the confusion she was causing. This is a lesson about flesh, isn’t it? I asked.Blowfly, she whispered on my throat as we made tense, pensive love.Blowfly, blowfly.

The houses those suburbs could afford were roofed with old savings books, and some seeped gravy at stitches in their walls; some were clipped as close as fury, some grimed and corner-bashed by love and the real estate, as it got more vacant, grew blady grass and blowfly grass, so called for the exquisite lanterns of its seed, and the land sagged subtly to a low point, it all inclined way out there to a pit with burnt-looking cheap marble edges and things and figures flew up from it like the stones in the crusher Piers had for making dusts of them for glazes: flint, pyroclase, slickensides, quartz, schist, snapping, refusing, and spitting high till the steel teeth got gritty corners on them and could grip them craw-chokingly to grind. It’s their chance, a man with beerglass-cut arms told me. Those hoppers got to keep filled. A girl, edging in, bounced out cropped and wrong-coloured like a chemist’s photo, crying. Who could blame her among in-depth grabs and Bali flights and phones? She was true, and got what truth gets.

For E.B. The sprig of unknown bloom you sent last fall spent the long winter drying on my wall, mounted on black. But it had turned to fluff some months ago. Tonight I took it down because I thought that I had had enough of staring at it. Brittle, dry and brown, it seemed to speak too plainly of a waste of friendship, forced to flower, culled in haste. So, after months of fearing to walk past in case the stir should scatter it to bits, I took it out to scatter it at last with my own breath, and so to call us quits.

ephemeral as tinkerbell unmoored yet not unmoved tossed cloudward, flipped sans volition into the flow going but not wanting to go without the other flotsam

I have seen enough blue-green for one day. My eyes are tired of peering at the busy speckled lines the lasered surface throws back. Outside, the light falls in jagged needles through raveled air. The world is gray. From up there, it’s blue, the tiny water world, where life climbed into the air and turned green, maybe from envy that it’s not somewhere else. It’s not easy, being this way. It’s impossible to rest with that great light going on and off always in the same place, knowing that it’s necessary, unless you want to turn white, in icy quiet, against the black still motion of the tattered specks of stars. It’s enough to send you running ragged, back to the sea. Down there it’s blue, too, the color of deep water when at eighty feet there’s no bottom and no sides to choose. Suspended, up-ended, you have no sense of proportion, lose perspective. There’s only drifting with the flow, until your bubbles rip a seam upward showing you where you have to go—back to the green, and then the yellow and the red, measured out in time for you to find, until you reach white, and you’ve got it all. All is too much to see. We must have shades. The separation of the light exists somewhere in particles, torn into fragmentary bits to play, scattered like the fall leaves, but moving in waves—hello, goodbye— on a collision course with white, and black, and gray. The green of life requires blue, not too deep or too intense, just a line of blue-green held in mind, to knit tatters of shrouded days, tint the darkness, and relieve the time of glare. Once in a while you know where it belongs, in the order of the sharp-edged double bow I saw this morning, cutting its way into gray memory to even up the edges of the ragged clouds.

I stand there under the high limbs of locust watching my father point a black gun into the air his arms steepled for the stillness required to split the proverbial hair with a BB. I would like to throw a red hat to catch what will smack from the barrel but instead the songbird drops fast—a warm stone through liquid swimming between us. The stink of yellow sulfur thick. And the twist of his mouth, like tangled purple boughs or crossed legs of what he never dreamed he'd hit. Years after, I will admit only to so much. Blue moon tomorrow. Do we ever get a second chance? It's what I don't say that speaks loudest.

I Africans in the hold fold themselves to make room for hope. In the afternoon’s ferocity, tar, grouting the planks like the glue of family, melts to the run of a child’s licorice stick. Wet decks crack, testing the wood’s mettle. Distilled from evaporating brine, salt dusts the floor, tickling with the measure into time and the thirst trapped below. II The captain’s new cargo of Igbos disturbs him. They stand, computing the swim back to land. Haitians still say:Igbo pend’c or’ a ya! But we do not hang ourselves in cowardice. III Sold six times on the journey to the coast, once for a gun, then cloth, then iron manilas, her pride was masticated like husks of chewing sticks, spat from morning-rank mouths. Breaking loose, edge of handcuffs held high like the blade of a vengeful axe, she runs across the salt scratch of deck, pain deeper than the blue inside a flame. IV The sound, like the break of bone could have been the Captain’s skull or the musket shot dropping her over the side, her chains wrapped around his neck in dance.

As through marble or the lining of certain fish split open and scooped clean, this is the blue vein that rides, where the flesh is even whiter than the rest of her, the splayed thighs mother forgets, busy struggling for command over bones: her own, those of the chaise longue, all equally uncooperative, and there’s the wind, too. This is her hair, gone from white to blue in the air. This is the black, shot with blue, of my dark daddy’s knuckles, that do not change, ever. Which is to say they are no more pale in anger than at rest, or when, as I imagine them now, they follow the same two fingers he has always used to make the rim of every empty blue glass in the house sing. Always, the same blue-to-black sorrow no black surface can entirely hide. Under the night, somewhere between the white that is nothing so much as blue, and the black that is, finally; nothing, I am the man neither of you remembers. Shielding, in the half-dark, the blue eyes I sometimes forget I don’t have. Pulling my own stoop- shouldered kind of blues across paper. Apparently misinformed about the rumored stuff of dreams: everywhere I inquired, I was told look for blue.

A blue anchor grains of grit in a tall sky sewing I inch and only sometimes as far as the twisted pole gone in spare colors Too late the last express passes through the dust of gardens

The blue booby lives on the bare rocks of Galápagos and fears nothing. It is a simple life: they live on fish, and there are few predators. Also, the males do not make fools of themselves chasing after the young ladies. Rather, they gather the blue objects of the world and construct from them a nest—an occasional Gaulois package, a string of beads, a piece of cloth from a sailor’s suit. This replaces the need for dazzling plumage; in fact, in the past fifty million years the male has grown considerably duller, nor can he sing well. The female, though, asks little of him— the blue satisfies her completely, has a magical effect on her. When she returns from her day of gossip and shopping, she sees he has found her a new shred of blue foil: for this she rewards him with her dark body, the stars turn slowly in the blue foil beside them like the eyes of a mild savior.