POEM OF THE DAY
The Country of the Blue for Cameron Jones
Here, native, is your country:
a cloudy wrack blown from Prospero's sleeve,
where--before Mona Lisa sits down,
before Leonardo can draw
in a yellow haze
of smoke and dirt
her smile,
the floating crags of her landscape,
that threat, this earth
of cadmium, ocher, sienna, and umber--
all is flushed clean
by cobalt, ultramarine, and prussian
Blue,
making a land
equally of dusk and dawn,
forever on the cusp of departing.
I slip on Prospero's starry robe
and recite: “Oh brave new world,
that has such color in it!”
And you, momentarily Miranda, reply,
“Tis new to thee.”
Stripping down to Caliban, I growl:
“My country, tis
of thee...”
and you flee, as Ariel
sweet doppler
sing into the blue,
into frequencies
of the high invisible...
“in a cowslip's bell I lie.”
On the borderland of sleep,
where deep waters
are spiked by the seep
of morning-light,
I hold and am held, in regard
of the illimitable concave
of your blue heaven,
like the miracle chinese porcelain
catches in its bowl
the intimate
in the infinite,
the infinite
in the intimate.
You stand there, little Artemis,
naked on the lip of daylight,
and hold out to me, on spread fingers
the blue-black shadow
of your web, a cat’s cradle winking
with blue fire—
I fall awake, the smoking wisp
of a croon clasped
in the whorl of my ear:
“This, this is the poem.”
Dana Pattillo 1992
(PoD 3)
7:35:58 AM 
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