Le Jour Bleu

In this day hovering between the magic of Tutka Bay and the reality of returning home, I’m grateful for the experience you all made possible.  Thanks.  I am not (at least haven’t been) a blogger but I want to do my part to keep this experience going, so I’ll start with a post that several of you requested, including Carolyn.  (As with the rest of our posts, my understanding is that none of our poems or other contributions to these pages will be re-published beyond the group without the OK of the contributor.)

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 L’heure Indigo

             an epistolary ekphrastic expiation

Tutka Bay Lodge

September 7, 2014

Dear Carolyn,

Already … one word in and I know that I cannot do justice to the

Blue Hour in 26 lines, even having waited diligently to begin

Composing the music, forestalling the generative impulses til

Darkness and dawn are deep in their moonlit embrace, and

Ekphrasis is free to traipse about the boardwalks unmolested,

Free to admire and choose her scaffolding under the Tutkan moon,

Growing with confidence as she weaves with each ebb and flood,

Hews and sculpts, the spillage floating like bull kelp in a sea of words.

I know already that my attempt will not be adequate, and not

Just as Kim Jong-il was inadequate, as Bush and Benedict were inadequate, but

Keeping faith with the harlequin winging through black night, I will leave

Lit the invisible porch light of my mind, concede the productive physics of fear.

My verse is a dingy built for two

Not the Starship Enterprise, venturing where no abecedarian on Earth has,

Only trés jolie, sans sound or fury signifying anything cosmic or importante.

Perhaps it is that I am still transfixed by the luminosity of tiny flagellates,

Quite unable yet to trust sense beyond senses, my aim too pedestrian or Spartan, I

Realize now I want to walk across the bay, awash in golden light, leaving no ripples,

Still, not escaping or avoiding or even just enduring the during of the world.

These are the last moments before the sound of lines becomes the silence between.

Until then, I will hover, revel, in this stillpoint mist, and know that

Very soon I will, yes, seek communion one last time, anaphorically speaking, and yes

While I prepare to break fast with, yes, seedcakes and herbed eggs, as I pull on my           

X-tra Tuffs, venture into the world of moonjellies and seals and puffins, and

Yes, poets, I pray secretly that I will not be judged, from inside or out, a total

Zilch, a zed, only entirely inadequate to the subject I had announced.

Ekphrastically, ephemerally yours,

John