everywhere i seek totalizing blues

in cerulean canvases stretched atmospheric

rifting at their seams, sky being more

patchwork than the eye wants to imagine

mesmerized by the expanse. like the sky

i too see myself in the river. a memory

fragmented by time, explanatory, emerges

from the depths it gasped out of:

my young hands, reaching, ardent & hell-bent

on living, caught in the current

flowing unrelenting swaying shaking

my soul out of my body but the tether

was strong to the surface

& crossing the treachery,

my uncle who is no longer

my uncle but still some warm hand from

the past grasps my hand

hoists my body from its reluctant downward spin

(the handiwork of gravity)

the cord to my mother’s

inner tube having snapped

in the whitewater

(womb like origins interrupted)

and somehow, lateral movement crossing the channel,

my heaving breathless self breath-filled

deposited on the shore like some many sediments

& the frog eggs i sought in

childhood ponds (totalizing greens) all algal stink &

saline, fermenting air,

yet despite these proofs of life

 

everywhere i seek totalizing blues

a commensurate sorrow, resonant hum

bass from the midnight zone

a jazz syncopated by puncture wounds &

immediately-following mending a tending by

hands tender

worn raw by the weaving together of lines

memory shards

interrelations a word that flows out of itself, an honest outpouring

hands reaching across the current

pull of skin against ribs, stretch of the body beyond itself:

 

everywhere i seek totalizing blues

a deep humming radiating from the

heart vibrating through the cavernous

insides echoing in

eardrums crackling from the record player,

a saxophone’s blue call not a beckoning

but a lament that justifies itself

talks of some loss,

traversing the horizons of oceanic emotion i cascade

back inside myself a gentle folding cocoon return to

interior comfort the waters of the body,

the rush of the bloodstream down my neck

seeing it on x-ray i felt it a river you see,

 

everywhere i seek totalizing blues

the rich indigo of cyanotype calls out to my soul

like oxygen to lungs

seductive, that deep dark:

dangerous that way.

siren song calling deeper, arms pulling towards

gold flecks settling at the bottom of the pool

searching flows, in faucets & asphalt-bound arrangements

 

everywhere i seek totalizing blues

the limits of my body being

no limits no my no body

the melding melting molding

the improvisational dance of water across their discontents,

their antagonists, the riverbed

buried histories no one has come back for, or left there for

the onset of death or time: the rusted trick

bike my brother tended, hubcaps, bricks –

what we can’t carry, what will sink us,

an anchor not grounding but murderous

 

everywhere i seek totalizing blues a blue

so deep it forces all else out of me i too

become blue blue only all & entirely indigo

denim patchwork i’m already living into

like a prophecy or an ancestral letterman jacket

you must understand i do not mean to

reproduce endless skies, rivers, oceans, star maps,

bodies sinking suspending

 

it all gets old, as we do, & so

 

as a fact of grief, a result of gravity & unrelenting time, everywhere i seek totalizing blues.