Blue

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.