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holly hughes

Singing the Blues: A Meditation

“I used to wonder why the sea was blue at a distance
and green close up and colorless for that matter in your hands.
A lot of life is like that. A lot of life is just learning to like blue.”

—Sir Miriam Pollard
Blue of distant mountains
sea ruffled by wind,
sky flung with clouds;
blue of hardened steel, of brimstone;
blue of grief, veins, thin milk,
blue of cracks in glacier ice.

More blues than words
to name them, though we try:
plumbago, phthalo, Prussian
indigo, cyan, smalt.

Blue of Phoenician whelks and abalone,
blue lobsters, blue crab, blue mussels:
see how the sea leaves its blue stain
on all her children.

Blue hour, blue day, blue moon.
Blue, light or dark:
noon sky, deep twilight.

Birds can’t see blue
yet each day they fly into it
through it, beyond it.

We go in search of the blue
which hides in the earth’s pockets:
aquamarine, lapiz lazuli, chrysocolla,
azzurro oltramarino

Blue of daybreak in Egypt
dusk in France—L’heure Bleu—
noon sacrifice to the Mayans,
who painted themselves blue
before cutting out their victims’ hearts.

Blue of royalty,
blue of grace,
the richest pigment,
dye that stains the Tuareg’s hands;
blue of Botticelli, Homer, O’Keefe.
The Empire of Blue fades to Starry, Starry Night.

And so blue veins quicken to the pulse
of tides, sea floods and ebbs,
veins carry their cargo of light
across the lake where the clouds rise
to find the blue mountains constantly walking
to the blue horizon where color stumbles and blurs.
The priests lay down their knives,
mussels open to the sea’s sweet tongue
and every shade of blue is named
and lost again.

The Great Alzana

“Sometimes you feel you haven’t given people enough.
I feel I have to fall and break my neck for them.”
Howard Davis
from the obituary of Howard Davis, "The Great Alzana"
in The New York Times Sept. 2002

As if the wire weren't thin enough, 5/8" cable forty feet in the air,
he wanted no safety net, skipping down the shimmering line,
breaking bones so many times —arms, legs, ribs, ankles and his back, twice—
New York passed a law requiring net for aerial acts of more than 25 feet.

At 14, he saws down a neighbor's tree, sticks it in the ground,
runs a cable to his own tree, learns to walk the high wire
under the waxing moon, earns 100 pounds at a fair in Sheffield.
Goes to work for Ringling, Barnum, skips rope forward, back, blindfolded.

The first to carry three people on a bicycle. What we must do
to earn their respect, knows how his audience loved being voyeurs
as he runs the wire each night, trembling under the hot lights,
darkness thick and yawning, no net below. What else can he give them?

He retires in the 1970s but keeps his high wire—no net—
in the backyard until his heart won't brook it. Even then,
when the moon was full, his wife said, he'd climb the ladder
and just sit there.

He dies at 82, but some nights she says
she sees him still under the waning moon,
running his high wire, nothing left to give,
nothing left to break or lose.