Divagations
       

For then I was a Frenchman
who loved the word azur, repeated it
on a gray cold afternoon, so often
near the blanket-rolling sea.

For many years I waited, sicklingering
where the light is yellowgreen,
saying goodbye, goodbye, to the same lover,
whose back was turning on the bed.

For in those afternoons the sky revealed itself,
one moment azur, one
reconvened passion, and
scattered light, lemonwhite, against itself.

Thin and flexible. His blond head going.
How like light, moving as a thin scarf
rising in an updraft
for years.

That year I was a figure in a standing pool.
My eyes looked at the surface from the same,
emerald plane. Lights and what else
for deep in the blackbottom pool

turned the smokeblack sky with the rosegray clouds.
Like a thick perfume colored was the humid night.
The sea wall, painted black against salt.
White birds landed in the surf the year when I say goodnight.

A tree swallow skimming the pool, its hard mouth
moving the water line on the world,
pocketing into a date palm to set three more to flight.
For helplessly I myself when I delight in you.

I lift close another language, half-wrong to say.
Many years in the white envelope labeled blue.
So much is all it will say.
For the ocean cocks its trembling.

It will trouble you to read it.
So much is what it says.
I won't be and I am.

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Copyright © 2020 Christine Gosnay All rights reserved
from The Wanderer
Beloit Poetry Journal
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission