My Religion is Blue

In a story by Albert Camus a man on a black bicycle rides quickly past the ocean
every morning on his way to work. He cannot look at the ocean.
It would be like taking a lover to work. What work? There would be no work
ever. He turns his head away. He takes in the brown hills, the crows in the cypress,
chews on that dry beauty all day until he is sand inside,
until his movements become so arid and idiotic he can barely pedal home.
But in the evening, in the blue jacaranda twilight, he rides so slowly past the sea
he can barely keep the wheels spinning. He is in love with the "calm immensity,
these wakes folded under wakes—these liquid routes."  His religion is blue.

In the cobalt doctrine, in the oceanic theology of blue,
the little island of the heart is white
and the people are curled up inside its tiny rooms
waiting for their names to be called.
Who calls them or from where to where
doesn't matter, because the caller changes constantly,
as constantly as light changes its fascination with the long fingers,
the waves, and flight patterns of blue.

Sometimes a white hinged window will blow open
and a lucky one will unfurl his sleepy arms
and return to a late September afternoon
where he is holding her and they are swaying like the blue hips of the sea,
marveling at the blue music the shore birds make
but what is even more marvelous is that he can see
the quick scuttling notes of their joyous score.
If he had a pen he could write it down,
but then he realizes he doesn't need a pen
because the air is holding it, displaying it like a crazy joyous sacred scroll
that disappears as soon as you understand the contents.

The thick blue light of autumn is slowing everything down for miraculous inspection
and he reaches out his hand for a wedge of it, for a bite of it,
but he bursts instead, exclaiming "My religion is blue!"
And he kneels down in the blue folds of shallow water.
And she knew what he meant. And she wrote the paler,
lighter blue version of it all in a poem.
And for that he was allotted his tiny room in the white heart
with his name engraved in sea water on a thick blue door.

Sometimes a thick blue door will open
And she will be sailing again through a cobalt sky in the white house
with no windows and no doors, just a white bed.
And he is lying next to her. They are not speaking. They are barely touching.
Their religion is blue. They are the snowy egret angels of it aloft, adrift
administering enough azure to a man on a black bicycle
that the sand inside of him turns again to water.
He is cool again and can move through the "calm immensity,"
through the blue waves and liquid routes,
as though he has feathers or scales or lighter bones,
as though his religion is blue.

The Furies

If we skin ourselves with poisoned knives
and write a different story on our veins
will it be a better one?

*
The Furies are heading east in an appropriated Cadillac,
longer and blacker than the bottom of the Mariana Trench. They could have flown;
they love the freezing justice of snow flurrying in their pin-wings,
but they are carrying a quarter-ton of cataclysmic paraphernalia
in boxes assembled from broken teeth and bone marrow, so they had to take the car,
plus, they've got a bottle of Bushmills now and a cooler of longnecks,
and they can't quit chanting, "got to think like us to drink like us."
And if one of them gets it wrong, "got to drink like us to think like us,"
of course she has to take a shot.

Half a millennia and 5,000,000 drinks later,
one of them chucks a bottle at a store window.
She hates the mannequin's unwomanly hips
and incinerates it from the khaki's up when she learns how its clothes were made.

"They don't have to be a goddesses," she smolders, "but they shouldn't be pigs."

Her heart is the same heart, the same temperature, the same beat
as the heart caged in the boiling throat of the sun.
Her words flare and awe and alter the landscape.
Listen hard, but stand back.
                                      
*
If we cut off our eyelids,
if we pound nails into our joints
so that our arms stay open wide again,
will we catch a glimpse of our soul,
barely bigger than an ash now,
and beg it to return?

*
Somewhere around the 3 quarter millennia mark,
the second one  pulls a muttering sick man from a doorway.
She cradles him with one hand and makes soap to bath him with in the other,
distilling a little whiskey with sweet orange oil, boiling down the lye.


This one's bones are Stonehenge. Her blood is cayenne.
Strong as the bare arms of August,
she will clean the world off of you. Mend you.
Carry you to safety. Or kill you.

*
If we kneel in pools of filthy ice and broken glass,
if we beat our backs with clothes hangars and electrical wire
until we pass out and the bad ideas drain from us,
in the wounds will we feel a faint surge of light
and remember who we are?

*
The third Fury never drinks as much as the other two.
Her fingers are long and agile, but burned on the tips
from beading hot coal and bits of comet
to make her volcanic necklaces.
If she winds one around your neck while you are sleeping,
you will fall through the floor
and wake up tethered to your guilt.

But now, she is stringing ocean glass and amethyst across the black arc of midnight,
leaving long strands of silence on either side.
"I know what they deserve," she tells her sisters, "but I'll try this first,
after all, they have not had a good dream in such a long time."

Dian Sousa's second book of poems, LULLABIES FOR THE SPOOKED AND COOL has just been released by Millie Grazie Press, Santa Barbara, Phnom Penh. She teaches surfing lessons for women through Camp Swell in Morro Bay. 

We will be featuring Dian Sousa's book in May.  If you wish to purchase Lullabies for the Spooked and Cool, feel free to e-mail Dian Sousa.

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