ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Joannie Stangeland is the author of In Both Hands and Into the Rumored Spring, from Ravenna Press, plus two chapbooks and a pamphlet of prose poems. Joannie's poetry has also appeared in Prairie Schooner, Cimarron Review, DMQ Review, First Water: Best of Pirene's Fountain, and other journals and anthologies.
September 21, 2016
Sketch in Blue with Darker Water
I found a feather from a Steller's jay,
left it, let it stay on our front stairs.
Now the weather opens other rooms,
chapel-ceiling fresco cloud encircled.
West, the sky looks more like sea,
steely tide swelling toward the hills.
You worry when my waves of blue
come crashing, knock me back hard.
I read Maggie Nelson's Bluets, heard
another woman sing a small blue thing.
To paint the dragon on the Chinese plate
the cobalt’s mined, crushed, melted.
On some days, blue's the garden blooming
past the porch, a path through forget-me-nots,
a Parrish dusk plunging into night
deeply and translucent blue.
Some days, I am ground and sintered,
set adrift on the lake's grayer shades
lapping into black, where I look down,
down, hear you calling from the shore.
"Sketch in Blue with Darker Water" began as an attempt to thread color through a manuscript I've been working on, and it became a poem to my husband about the thread of depression that runs through my days and can distance me from my family. The phrase "small blue thing" refers to Suzanne Vega's song by that name, and the phrase "a Parrish dusk" refers to paintings by Maxfield Parrish. Sintering, used in making cobalt blue pigment, is the process of heating, often with compression, to form a solid mass.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
