Poetry

Blue

By T Clear

If I say
I’m going to paint my house goat,
it doesn’t mean I keep a goat in the house
but that I’m going to paint it
a certain grey tone, found on page 57
of A Dictionary of Color, ©1930.
Yet that would be a lie
because I already painted it starch,
or daphne, or maybe zenith, hard to tell.

Everything hinges on the light,
how lagoon becomes iceberg,
and virgin sheds innocence to afterglow
as a cloud conceals the sun.
Some mornings I awaken to opal
and come home to slag.
In a drizzle, king’s blue fades to peasant.
All so slippery.

I want to say that my house is Aphrodite,
that it’s Versailles and love-in-a-mist,
But that old goat keeps showing up,
stays the winter, lingers into July.
And here I am a year older.