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in
collection Houses Without
Walls, 2006,
Two
Rivers Press,
ISBN 1-901677-47-8
Today's Blue
Today’s blue’s nothing
turquoise, it does not
shift
in the light from duck-egg bright to aqua,
it
is not a patch of sky to mend a sailor’s trousers
or
the uniform of girls let out in crocodiles, on pre-set
routes
through Mellor’s Park on Wednesday afternoons.
It's
not indelible on children’s tongues, or carbon
smudged
on sweaty palms and touch-type fingertips,
nor
is it jazzy/sad mood indigo for something small
you’ll
always miss but never really had; today’s blue
is
a memory of worsted cloth, tacked long and loose,
worn
inside out, marked white with broken lines
of
tailor’s chalk. It is a man cross-legged on a table
in
a backroom; it is not my father, though he’s there
and
with me and would understand the weft and warp,
the
mesh of yarn, tight-woven to a blue so dark
you'd
call it black; that he’d call midnight.
Susan Utting
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