My life is somber
like those blues of Picas
so
so
I will treat you
to the most beautiful
of my suicides
I already hear
the staccato laughter
of Rimbaud at dusk
and Giorgione
playing the luth
to a Venetian maiden
and my father a sudden barfly
singing guarachas
to a jiggy Silvia Plath...
May I have a drumroll
while entering
in Hell?
Dusting off the shrine of a goddess
I forgot her name.
She blessed me once
in light blue robe, golden nimbus
and myrtle blooms
when I was an outcast
in an outcast country
(I forgot its name too)
*
A woman in the nude dances
on top of a beached whale in summer,
massive whale as the full moon
on the horizon. A sitar is playing
some kind of monsoon ballad
before a bonfire and silent gannets.
It's eventide. The full moon in yellow dress
dances with the naked woman.
*
I come across a top hat
in the middle of the street
dancing with a stray cat
in black fur and yellow feet.
The top hat hops me a scowl,
the cat spins me around a smile,
and the moon waxing awhile
in the golden eye of an owl.
The stray cat nimbly runs away
when some foxes bark to the top
hat now flying up on his way
to the hand of a whistling cop.
*
Under an opaline sky
a wolf not famished
but philosophical
strolls along the beach.
Likewise an odd man
in golden raincoat
and black beret.
He's the poet of the village
and never speaks
except to the pebbles,
the rainbows
and the wandering wolf.
*
In fine fettle the old lion
Still holds up the sun
with his mane at dawn.
What saves me of topping myself today:
my cat doing a handstand by the window,
Dalida singing Bambino at dawn,
the last spoor of kiss you left
on my unmown stubble,
the beauty of contrails streaming along the blue sky,
the smell of horse manure in the streets,
the fulsome warbles of a thrush in the morning,
the siren-cry of ambulances that carry not my corpse,
the rain-scented beams of the sun,
that William Carlos Williams' line:
the night passes, and never passes,
the loud laughing of mum in 1978
while sawing at her Singer,
the last smile you blew like a feather
into the air before waving a fond adieu,
the last spoor of kiss
you left on my bristly stubble...
Love passes and never passes.
At the center the Minotaur
waits for me
the winding maze is
my wandering mind
I lost the track of the thread
spun by Ariadne's
ball of twine
*
A woman in a moon-glossed coif
pours blue milk
into a Dutch oven.
She smiles at me
still struggling at stool
to feed verses into
my tablet.
Suddenly the woman
flew away
like a moth
*
'Non serviam'-said Satan
to God
'No serviam"-says the Muses
to me every morning
at stool just about
to be inspired
to be poet
to be
*
At stool
I dreamt of Tizian
painting you
with his fingertips
using all the colour-hues
conjured up
by my words
*
Strolling about the Heath
-as was my wont-
Star-addicted and mud-ridden
all coalesced
in the pool of clarity
today
nothing is out
of kilter
of me
'Under his feet was something like a pavement made of lapis lazuli'
(Exodus 24:10)
'Dolce color d'oriental zaffiro'
(Dante Alighieri)
'Un colore nobile, bello, il piu perfetto
di tutti i colori'
(Cennino Cennini, Il Libro dell'Arte)
'At last he rose and twitched his mantle blue,
Tomorrow to fresh and pastures new'
(John Milton)
'Within the circuit of this plodding life
there enters moments of azure hue'
(Henry David Thoreau)
'Tell me how far the morning leaps,
Tell me what time the weaver sleeps
Who spun the breadths of blue!'
'Nature rarer uses Yellow
Than another Hue.
Saves she all of that for Sunsets
Prodigal of Blue'
(Emily Dickinson)
'Oh never weep for love
that's dead,
since love is seldom true,
but changes his fashion
from blue to red
from brightest red to blue'
(Elizabeth Siddal)
'Blue! Gentle cousin of the forest-green,
Married to green in all the sweetest flowers,
Forget-me-not, the bluebell and, that queen
Of secrecy, the violet with strange powers.'
'And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender'd.'
(John Keats)
'The Bluebell cannot charm me now,
the heath has lost its bloom,
the violets in the glen below,
they yield no sweet perfume.
But, though I mourn the sweet Bluebell,
'tis better far away,
I know how fast my tears would swell
to see it smile to-day.'
(Emily Bronte)
'The tender azure of the unruffled deep'
(Lord Byron)
'Northern lights remarkably fine
-chiefly a purple-blue-
in shooting pyramids"
(Samuel T. Coleridge)
'Returning home, I mounted on horseback and galloped to the steppe.
I love to gallop on a fiery horse through the tall grass, in the face of the
desert wind; greedily I gulped down the fragant air and fixed my gaze
upon the blue distance.'
(Mikhail Lermontov)
'Moi, je trouvé ma tulipe noir et mon dahlia bleu'
(Charles Baudelaire)
'On nage dans l'air bleu, c'est effrayant'
(Claude Monet)
' Par le soirs bleus d'été j'irai dans les sentiers"
'L'azur sonneur'
(Arthur Rimbaud)
'Le Poète, l'amour du Beau, voilà sa foi,
L'azur, son étendard, et l'Ideal , sa loi!'
(Paul Verlaine)
'I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china'
'The sky is blue like the inside of a cup of lapis lazuli"
(Oscar Wilde)
'I noticed in the shadows there are blues and violets.'
(Eugène Delacroix)
'The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees.'
(Rainer Maria Rilke)
'Sigh, O you little stars! O, sigh and shake
your blue apparel!
'And the flame of the blue star of twilight,
hung low on the rim of the sky"
(W. B. Yeats)
'A blue moment is nothing less than soul'
(Georg Trakl)
'Who walked between the violet and the violet
Who walked between
the various ranks of varied green
going in white and blue, in Mary's colour,
talking of trivial things.'
(T.S. Eliot)
'The Seine, old egotist,
meanders imperturbably towards the sea,
Ruminating on
Weeds and rain...
If through his sluggish
watery sleep come dreams
they are the blue ghosts
of king-fishers.'
(Hope Mirrlees)
'Ah! Les promenades le long des berges fleuries, mes amies les grenouilles qui rêvaient, le ventre au frais, sur une feuille de nenuphar, et les lis d'eau coquets et frêles, au milieu des grandes herbes fines qui m'ouvraient soudain, derrière un saule, un feuillet d'album japonais quand le martin-pêcheur fuyait devant moi comme une flamme bleue!'
(Guy de Maupassant)
'And the blue went out of the sea, and it rolled in waves of pure lemon
which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach.'
'And the blue flowers arise, all orderly."
'And rooks dropping cool cries from the high blue.'
'Why can't the summer last forever? and housemaids be forever blue and yellow.'
'My window completely filled with blue for a wonder."
'The sun blazes my skylight blue.'
'and yesterday had the great joy of smelling a dead horse in a field. No sooner smelt than 12 -no- 15 vultures descended from the azure and proceeded to pick it. They have blue bald necks like snakes.'
'I wish my dolphin were by my side, in a bath, bright blue, with her tail curled.'
'The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and bring the wave lapping blue to the shore.'
'...as in the rough stream of a glacier the ice holds a splinter of bone, a blue petal, some oak trees, and rolls them on."
'Walked back from Glynde. To get mushrooms before dinner; every grass almost had blues asleep on it.'
'With a feather, a blue feather...flying mountain through the air...there to lose what binds us here...'
"He began following her from room to room and at last they came to a room where in a blue light, as if the reflection came from many china dishes, she talked somebody, he listen to her talking. She talked to a servant, saying simply whatever came into her head, "We shall need a big dish to-night, Where is it-the blue dish?"
'So Peter Walsh and Clarissa, sitting side by side on the blue sofa, challenged each other.'
'It was seeing blue hydrangeas that made her think of him and the old days'
"If that blue could stay forever"
"A blue snob like myself"
'I had begun to doubt my own identity-and imagined I was part of a seagull, and dreamt at night of deep pools of blue water, full of eels.'
'(And it must be remembered that when bright colours like blue and yellow mix themselves in our eyes, some of it rubs off on our thoughts)'
'But it is tantalising to think what letter I could write, if, as I say I could merely print off my mind upon a sheet of blue paper about the side of the terrace.'
'In course of time the talk turned to colours: how different people see colour differently; how painters are affected by their place of birth, whether in the Blue South or the Grey North'
'There is nothing to take the place of childhood. A leaf of mint brings it back; or a cup with a blue ring.'
'And, I add, Green and Blue and the heron were the wild outbursts of freedom"
"Well now for my blue knitting"
(Virginia Woolf)
'I shall remember you standing in your blue apron and waving. Oh damn it, Virginia. I wish I didn't love you so much.'
(Vita Sackville-West)
'On the blue flames of honey, waterdrops of sapphire,
the bluebells(the blue fires of deepest air)'
(Edith Sitwell)
'All the things are floating in my brain on a sea of blue Ripolin'
(Katherine Mansfield)
'Wrap me close, sheets of lavender. Pour your blue
and purple dreams into my ears...
Pale blue lavender, you are the colour of the sky
when it is fresh-washed and fair...
I smell the stars...they are like tulips and narcissus.'
(Amy Lowell)
'O give me burning blue'
(H.D.)
'There shall be swallows bringing back the spring
over the long blue meadows of the sea.'
'Blue dust of evening over my city,
over the oceans of roofs and the tall towers
where the window-lights, myriads and myriads,
bloom from the walls like climbing flowers.'
'Behind us as we walk along the parkway,
our shadows danced.
fantastic shades in vivid blue.'
(Sara Teasdale)
'Blue letters light the entrance to Paradise put together
from little electric bulbs. Their blue is close to violet. It is a blue
of blue pansies and of the first morning mist to wreath itself over a
plowed field. It is a blue of vivid dreams and of cigarette smoke.
It is not the blue of heaven or of the Mediterranean. You see how
hard is to describe a colour.'
(Joseph Roth)
'Can we have beds here?' inquired Mr Pickwick, summoning the waiter.
'Don't know, Sir' replied the man; 'afraid we're full, sir- I'll inquire, Sir.'
Away he went for that purpose, and presently returned, to ask whether
the gentleman were 'Blue'
'Oh, Mr Fledgeby, said Mrs Lammle, to desert me in that way!
Oh, Mr Fledgeby, to abandon my pure injured rose and declare for blue!'
'At six o'clock next morning,Mr Bumble, having exchanged his cocked hat for a round one, and encase his person in a blue great-coat with a cape to it, took his place on the outside of the coach, accompanied by the criminals whose settlement was disputed, with whom, in due course of time, he arrived in London.'
(Charles Dickens)
'If I call stones blue it is because blue is the precise word, believe me.'
(Gustave Flaubert)
'Why does one take quite some time to recognize a color but then
after the decisive bend of the understanding quickly become ever
more convinced of the color. When the light from the front hall and
the light from the kitchen affect the glass door from outside at the same
time, greenish or rather not to depreciate the certainty of the impression,
green light pours almost all the way down the panes. When the light
in the hall is turned off and only the kitchen light remains, the pane
closer to the kitchen turns deep blue, the other whitish blue so whitish
that the whole drawing on the frosted glass(stylised poppy heads, tendrils,
various four-sided figures and leaves) dissolves.'
'How everything can be risked, how for all, for the strangest ideas a great fire
is prepared in which they die away and rise again. How it turned blue outside
the window.'
(Franz Kafka)
'it was blue o'clock the morning after the night before'
'Now where the blue hell am I bringing her beyond the veil?'
'A husky fifenote blew.
Blew. Blue bloom is on the.
Goldpinnacled hair.'
'Bloom. Old Bloom. Blue bloom is on the rye.'
'The former morganatic spouse of Bloom is hastily removed in the Black Maria. The princess Selene, in moonblue robes, a silver crescent on her head, descends from a Sedan chair, borne by two giants. An outburst of cheers '
'She was wearing the blue for luck, hoping against hope, her own colour
and lucky too for a bride to have a bit of blue somewhere on her because
the green she wore that day week brought grief'
'The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.'
'Nora, my faithful darling, my sweet-eyed blackguard girl, be my whore,
my mistress, as much as you like(my little frigging mistress!, my little
fucking whore!)you are always my beautiful wild flower of the hedges,
my dark-blue rain-drenched flower.'
(James Joyce)
'Hercule Poirot looked thoughtfully at his visitor.
He saw a pale face with a determined looking chin, eyes that were
more grey than blue, and hair that was of that real blue-black shade
so seldom seen-the hyacinthine locks of ancient Greece.'
'That's a funny thing on the ashtray. That's Egyptian, that is. It's a scarabee,
or some name like that. You know. Sounds like some kind of scratching disease
but it isn't. No, it's a sort of a beetle and it's made out of some stone. They call it
precious stone. Bright blue. A lazy-a lavis- a lazy lapin or something like that.
"Lapis lazuli," said Mrs Oliver.'
'She was upset. One thing she did say. I had some violets in a glass. She pointed
at them and cried out:
"Take those away. No blue flowers- never have blue flowers. Blue flowers are fatal
to you- remember that."
"And you know," added Mrs. Pritchard, " I always have told you that blue as a colour
is repellent to me. I feel a natural instinctive sort of warning against."'
(Agatha Christie)
'Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark,
darkening the daytime, torch-like with the smoking blueness
of Pluto's gloom,(...) Pluto's dark blue daze
black lamps from the halls of Dis,, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps
give off light,
lead me then, lead me the way.'
(David Herbert Lawrence)
'Blurred with emotion, one's eyes turned toward a virgin dawn of divine colours,
towards a miraculous moistness of purest azure.'
'Oh, those blues that stop your breath with the pang of fear."
(Bruno Schulz)
'In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.'
(Francis Scott Fitzgerald)
'Blue is an idea about distance, or Literature ends in that particular blue,
or here are several subjunctive blues'
(Ben Lerner)
"Dios esta azul"
(Juan Ramon Jimenez)
'Eras azul como noche que acaba'
'Ese azul que a lo lejos es siempre prometido'
(Vicente Alexandre)
'Por de pronto, bajo
Mis manos vacías
Un presentimiento
De azul se desliza,
Azul de otra infancia
Que tendrá unas nubes
Para perseguir
A muchos azules'
(Jorge Guillén)
'El mar hierve y ríe
con olas azules y espumas de leche y de plata,
el mar hierve y ríe
bajo el cielo azul.
El mar lactescente,
el mar rutilante,
que rie en sus liras de plata sus risas azules'
'Era una noche del mes
de mayo, azul y serena.
Sobre el agudo ciprés
brillaba la luna llena.'
(Antonio Machado)
'Pensar en tí es azul'
(Eduardo Carranza)
'En el sentido azul de las palabras,
hablabamos de las cosas de la mar,
de su mirada azul, de sus cabellos
peinados en azul de espejo azul'
(Enrique Badosa)
'If I haven't the red colour, I use the blue one'
(Pablo Picasso)
'Here is the flutter of the dreaming
Fast-living blue-eyed dragonflies'
'In a make-believe grove I have wandered
And into an azure cave delved.
Am I really real, I ponder,
And death will claim my true self?'
'I've learned you, blessed words, that man despises,
Ligeia, Seraphita, Straw, Lenore,
In giant bedroom heavy Nieva rises
And blue blood gushes from the granite floor.'
'Dragonflies weave paths across the blue'
(Ossip Mandelstam)
'If men at forty will be painting lakes
the ephemeral blues must merge for them in one.
The basic slate, the universal hue.
There is a substance in us that prevails'
'He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds,
then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still
the sky was blue. He wanted imperceptible air.
He wanted to see. He wanted the eye to see
and not be touched by the blue.'
'Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk.
Is music. It is like the strain
waked in the elderly by Susanna.'
'The gold tree is blue'
'A blue pigeon it is, that circles the blue sky.
On side-long wing, around and round and round.'
'The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
a part of labor and a part of pain,
and next in glory to enduring love,
not this dividing and indifferent blue.'
'Say that the palms are clear
in the total blue.
Are clear and are obscure;
that it is night;
That the moon shines.'
'If all the green of spring was blue, and it is.'
'And sometimes the sea
poured brilliant iris on the glistening blue.'
'The death of Satan was a tragedy
for the imagination. A capital
negation destroyed in his tenement
and, with him, many blue phenomena.'
'They said: "You have a blue guitar,
you do not play things as they are."
The man replied: "Things as they are
are changed upon the blue guitar.'
'Then the sea and heaven rolled as one
and from the two came fresh transfigurings
of freshest blue.'
'And blue broke on him from the sun,
A bullioned blue, a blue abulge,
Like daylight'
'And yellow, yellow thins the Northern blue.'
(Wallace Stevens)
'But once in a while the odd thing happens,
Once in a while the dream comes true,
And the whole pattern of life is altered,
Once in a while the moon turns blue.'
(W.H. Auden)
'Du rose, ils tombèrent dans le bleu.'
'le bleu pâle de Paris'
'Il songea qu'il touchait le lieu saint des suicides, bleu comme le ciel, bleu comme la liberté'
'Les mots bleus dont nous nous grisons
cessent un jour de nous rendre ivres'
'Ouvrant sur l'être et le non-etre
le criminel azur d'un rêve de Crimée'
'Quel va-et-vient incessant d'anges bleus'
'Je n'ai pas d'autre azur que ma fidélité'
(Louis Aragon)
'Le bleu renaît du gris, comme la pulpe éjectée d'un raisin noir'
'Boue, si méprisée, je t'aime. Je t'aime à raison de mépris ou l'on te tient,
Tu es si belle, après l'orage qui te fonde, avec tes ailes bleues.'
(Francis Ponge)
'Le banlieue est bleue
quand passe le juge'
(Benjamin Péret)
'Parce qu'il ne comprend plus rien, ni aux choses, ni aux êtres, il se précipite
chez la diseuse de bonne aventure (comme s'il n'y en avait pas de mauvaise).
-Mme de Rosalba' voyante, annonce un mariage (,,,)Voyage de noces en Italie.
A Venice la rouquine s'apercoit que'elle est enceinte. Neuf mois plus tard elle
accouche d'un enfant bleu.'
(René Crevel)
'Un jour je me trouvai sur la plate-forme d'un autobus violet. Il y avait là un jeune homme assez ridicule: cou indigo, cordelière au chapeau. Tout d'un coup, il proteste contre un monsieur bleu.'
(Raymond Queneau)
'Les cygnes languissants
ont fui les requins bleus '
'Marcel Duchamp: Sur le chemin,
il y avait un bœuf bleu près d'un banc
blanc. Expliquez-moi la raison
de gants blancs
maintenant?'
(Robert Desnos)
'Bleu des jacinthes,
Bleu des profondeurs,
Il vient d'un feu faiseur de rouge
Qui tourne au violet puis au bleu.
Il est dans la terre,
il nous cherche.
La mer
Peut l'ignorer.'
'L'azur est loin
Qui m'envahit.'
(Eugène Guillevic)
'Melancholy breakfast
blue overhead blue underneath'
'Blue windows, blue rooftops
and the blue light of the rain'
'The blueness of the hour
when the spine stretches itself
into a groan, then the golden cheek
on the dirty pillow, wrinkled by linen.'
'But I still fear to mention the blue
flowers. They scared me most and I
prolong other talk. There were fields of
them around the place, all blue, all
innocent. The artificial is always innocent.'
'I am guilty and the sky is blue
as a restaurant full of tapioca.'
'Is it night or day? The azure mummified minutes
pick their own scent for the surprising occasion'
'Here I am at my desk. The
light is bright enough
to read by it is a warm
friendly day I am feeling
assertive. I slip a few
poems into the pelican's
bill and he is off! out
the window into the blue!'
'The sky must be blue, but not
so blue as it ought to be. And
what good does it do when
all I can see is the deceptive glint of
something else in panting waters?'
'I'm going to die unless
my love soon chases
the clouds away
and the azure smiles
and browns my strong
belief that love is.'
(Frank O'Hara)
'July 4, Paris... Met the Lady of the Blue Pyjamas going over the bridge of a little canal.'
"And I asked her the color of her soul: Noir.'
(Harry Crosby)
'the deep blue air, that shows nothing,
and is nowhere, and is endless.'
'And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond the beach
Of shapes and shingles.'
(Philip Larkin)
'All the singing grass
busy with crickets and blue butterflies'
'Like streams the little by-roads run
Through oats and barley round the hill
To where blue willows catch the sun
By some white weather-boarded mill.'
(John Betjeman)
'La terre est bleue comme une orange'
(Paul Eluard)
Dusk hoods me in blue now, like a Mary.
O color of distance and forgetfulness.'
'I woke one day to see you, mother,
Floating above me in bluest air
On a green balloon bright with a million
Flowers and bluebirds that never were
Never, never, found anywhere.'
'By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.
I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet'
'The sparks are blue.
The blue sparks spill,
splitting like quartz into a million bits.'
'Over one bed in the ward, a small blue light
Announces a new soul. The bed is blue.
Tonight, for this person, blue is a beautiful color.'
'This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.'
'A great surgeon, now a tattooist,
tattooing over and over the same blue grievances '
'And in truth it is terrible,
Multiplied in the eyes of the flies.
They buzz like blue children
In nets of the infinite.'
'I find myself all too often lately imagining what a relief would be to bring a briefcase into work, big enough to hold one of those thick, blue, cloth-bound record books full of dreams '
'What word blue could get that dazzling drench of blue moonlight on the flat, luminous field of white snow, with the black trees against the sky, each with its particular configuration of branches?'
'I knew, from school, the sea cupped the bulge of the world like a blue coat, but my knowledge somehow never connected with what I saw.'
'the ocean is cerulean toward the horizon, vivid azure nearer shore, blue and sheened as peacock feathers.'
'Picking up a piece of water-smooth glass, Susan squinted through it into the sun. 'Look', she held it out to David.'Everything's so much nicer all blue'.
'The air crackles with his blue-tongued lightning-halloed angels.'
(Sylvia Plath)
'In the pit of red
you hid from the bone-clinic whiteness
But the jewel you lost was blue'
(Ted Hughes)
'The sea was then a very tender blue, like the dress of the Virgin Mary'
(Jean Rhys)
'As if blue not only had a heart, but also a mind.'
(Maggie Nelson)
'Everything is blue.'
'Sparrows are now the
same shade of blue as the sky'
(Victoria Chang)
'Still, a little black bird
won't return from the sky
blue, either.
And we, too, aren't gods
in miniature, that's clear.'
(Joseph Brodsky)
'Where is the grave
of Time? What would you picture for decay?
A horse's hoof, white bones, a lifeless tree,
cold hemispheres, dried moss, and a blue wave
breaking at noon on shores you will not see.'
(Weldon Kees)
'Ein dunkleres Blau wird zuteil deinem Haar, und ich rede von Liebe.'
'Die Sonnen des Halbschlaf sind blau wie dein Haar eine Stunde vor Morgen.'
'Im Blau
spritcht sie schattenverheiBendes Baumwort
und deiner Liebe Namen
zahlt seine Silben hinzu.'
'Vom Blau, das noch sein Auge sucht, trink ich als erster.'
(Paul Celan)
'Na snježnom zemljom
plave zvijezde'
'Plavo podne sjedi
na oblacima'
'U vrtovima sunčaju se gole djevojke
i plavi mlaz visoka vodoskoka
u plavu prazninu
šumi'
'Ja koracam livadama plav od sutona.'
(Antun Branko Šimic)
'Shuttles of trains going
north, going south, drawing
threads of blue.'
(Louis MacNeice)
'But though you are lean and frozen
-think of the blue bulls of Babylon.'
'Lie there, blue city, mine at last'
'Among blue leaves
the apples green and red
upon one tree stand out
most enshrined.'
(William Carlos Williams)
'The light blue body of the mermaid.'
'Helen!
She whom we hunted for many years
By the banks of the Scamander.
She was there, at the desert's lip;
I touched her;she spoke to me:
"It isn't true, it isn't true" she cried.
I didn't board the blue-bowed ship.
I never went to valiant Troy." '
(Yorgos Seferis)
'Argos gleams resplendent, a point of light shooting arrows of gold into the blue. Argos belongs to myth and fable: her heroes never took on flesh.'
'It is high noon. I want to have my lunch in Phaestos. We push on. The rain has stopped, the clouds have broken; the vault of blue spreads like a fan, the blue decomposing into that ultimate violet light which makes everything Greek seem holy, natural and familiar. In Greece one has the desire to bathe in the sky. You want to rid yourself of your clothes, take a running leap vault into the blue.'
(Henry Miller)
'Azure is a color that happily
promises great events'
(Adam Zagajewski)
'with an eyelid's double-beat
I consolidated the heavens
and with insane imagination
made them a shade of blue.'
(Zbigniew Hebert)
'Distances,
ecstatic motionlessness among the motion,
moments stilled in colour
pictures-
are we here or somewhere else?
The center is always light-blue.'
'And further on
the light blue island Iskia-
I'll place this as a sapphire on the ring'
'my azure mother
boundless and borderless,
this azure mother who embraces
but never confines'
(Yannis Ritzos)
'The man who spends the whole day
In an open boat
moving over luminous bays
will fall asleep at last inside the shade
of his blue lamp
as the islands crawl like huge moths
over the globe.'
'A blue sheen
radiates from my clothes.
Midwinter.
Jangling tambourines of ices.
I close my eyes.
There is a soundless world
there is a crack
where dead people
are smuggled across the border.'
'I am a mummy at rest
in the blue coffin of the forests.'
'Laundry hung in blue air.'
'In among the copses there was a murmuring of words in
a new language: the vowels were blue sky and the consonants
were black twigs...'
'Blue flowed past on the waters, flickering.'
'Ash-colored silence.
The blue giant passes by.
Cool breeze from the sea.'
(Tomas Transformer)
'The smooth stones you pick up and examine
under the moon's light have been blue
from the sea. Next morming
when you pull them from your trouser pocket,
they are still blue."
(Raymond Carver)
'We'd lie on benches and imagine how we would get to be a hundred years old, like turtles, and we'd still be together, in a house with light blue shutters, by the sea...'
'The men in dark blue suits were counting down the final seconds before the chain reaction of disintegration in Europe would be set off'
(Georgi Gospodinov)
"Suppose someone points to a vase and says 'Look at that marvellous blue-forget about the shape.
Or: 'Look at the marvellous shape-forget about the colour.' No doubt you'll do something different in each case."
(Ludwig Wittgenstein)
'On a mild sea afternoon of blue and gold
When the sky is a mild blue of a
Chinese bowl'
(Carson McCullers)
'I want to be the largest animal that ever existed, the one blue mother.'
(Ada Limon)
'Dressed in the colours of a country day
(Grey-blue, blue grey, the
white of seagulls' bodies)
Chardin's peasant woman'
(Eavan Boland)
'the roses in the gypsy's window in a blue
vase, look real, as unreal
as real roses.'
(Denise Levertov)
'Azure day,
makes my agonized blue window bleaker'
(Robert Lowell)
'I was a hunter whose animal
Is that dark hour when
the hemisphere moves
in the deep blue blaze of dews'
'That hour when all the Earth
Is drinking the blue drop of thunder'
(Rosemary Tonks)
'On the great blue door,
where it hurts.'
(Kaveh Akbar)
'And blue-skinned gods
with magical flutes
seduce the virgins to dance.'
(Tishani Doshi)
'Pre-verbal is the place where the body was yet a green-blue energy
greening, greened and bluing the stone'
(Natalie Diaz)
'I bought a blue
knife. I couldn't help
myself. It did not change
my life. It cut
the same as any other
knife, though blue.
which for a while felt new,
and I could define myself,
if I needed to,
as a person who
chose a blue knife, who
lived with a blue knife, who
cut quite a figure
with her blue
knife, though it was ordinary
in every way beyond its hue.
I have a drawerful
of knives like other knives,
and some of them cut
surprisingly well, straight through.
But know me not by my blood
but my blue.'
'That impersonal bashing sound.
Cold fingers combing through stones.
Looking for something. I
don't remember what. Blue fingers. Lips
A blue garment I called my power shirt.
Green-blue. Big enough it
floated in the wind
and barely touched me.'
(Diane Seuss)
'My world feels slightly askew, surreal and yet eerily normal -like one of those old sitcoms where characters turn off the lights at bedtimes, and suddenly everything glows blue.'
'Each autumn, when leaves begin to dream of gold, the night-tide at Derrynane shimmers neon blue.'
(Doireann Ni Ghriofa)
'azulejos of Lisbon!
They are pieces of my own life,
which has been glazed with sadness,
Look! on the surface of each tile:
a carnation, or little bird,
a rocking horse, a pierced heart, a holly bush.
Their colour is always moonlight blue-
the colour of the river Tagus.'
(Elaine Feinstein)
'We are in the north, and the bright sunshine cannot prenetrate the sea. Where the gentle water taps
the rocks there is still a surface skin of colour. The cloudless sky is very pale at the indigo horizon
which it lightly pencils in with silver. Its blue gains towards the zenith and vibrates there. But the sky
looks cold, even the sun looks cold.'
(Iris Murdoch)
'At times, it feels as if the past is very near. On certain evenings, when the sun has dropped and the air is turning blue'
(Olivia Laing)
'At the wake the night before, my grandfather became a spirit of blue flame. He flew out through the roof of the shrine, floated through the rooms of the nearby quarantine hospital, and left a disagreeable odour as he drifted through the village sky.'
(Yasunari Kawabata)
'We notice for the first time that the interior of Laughterland was painted a very watery blue, the colour, in fact. of a starling's egg.'
(Michael Symmons Roberts)
'A place where the seemingly ice-steeped sunlight streams in through stained-glass windows in various gradations of blue. A place where Christ hangs on the cross without the slightest trace of suffering'
'The morning hours when a blue-tinged light seeps from the bodies of all material things, penetrating your newly sleep-shorn eyes, miraculously.'
'Wandering into the living room at dawn, I felt as though all the furniture was wrapped in a blue cloth. A scene was playing out in which blue threads were being ceaseless spun out, filling the chilly air in front of me, and I would stand there in my long johns and stare at it, entranced. I had no idea that what seemed such a captivating hallucination was caused by my weakening eyesight.'
(Han Kang)
'It flows through me
like the blue wave.'
'The kingfisher rises out of the black wave
like a blue flower'
(Mary Oliver)
'The blue jay your neighbor
said was her mother'
(Hannah Sullivan)
'Blue jays spend every Friday with the devil, the old lady at the park told me.'
(Jenny Offill)
'There is a bluebird in my heart
that wants to get out'
'I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny
blue hands'
(Charles Bukowski)
'If only all language
could be ululation in blue vests.'
(Chen Chen)
'Si tan solo las revoluciones fueran azules'
(Lleny Díaz)
'La inseminación floreció.
Mi útero de semillas azules.
Me siento árbol de luz."
(Ángela Álvarez Sáez)
'En la vigilia estoy siempre en el centro de una vaga neblina luminosa de tinte gris o azul; veo en los sueños o converso con muertos, sin que ninguna de esas cosas me asombre."
(Jorge Luis Borges)
"I only regret that there is no kindred soul,
To climb with me this ladder to the clouds in the blue.'
(Xie Lingyun)
'A monkey's leaped into the blue ripples of my mind!'
(Gido Shushin)
'Irises blooming
from my feet-
sandals laced in
blue.'
(Matsuo Basho)
"Is your house near here?'
'Very near'
'I'll come if you let me read your diary'
'I'm going to burn my diary before I die.'
'But isn't there a sick man in your house?'
'How did you know?'
'You were at the station to meet him yesterday.
You had on a dark-blue cape. I was sitting near
him in the train.'
(Yasunari Kawabata)
"Ah! The only thing that can sleep in this vast city night is the shadow of a single blue cat
The shadow of a cat that tells the sad history of humanity
The blue shade of happiness I long for."
(Hagiwara Sakutaro)
'If the flame of a candle flickers and turns blue a spirit is present.'
(from the Appalachian folklore)
'He produced a blue handkerchief in which some plums and greengages were knotted. Peeling them carefully with a jack-knife, he dropped them into glasses of retsina to cool and offered them in turn impaled on a fork. There are times in Greece when you feel you could live with as little afterthought about food as Elijah; meals appear as though laid at one's elbow by ravens.'
'Away to the east we could discern the dim outlines of the Elaphonisi-Deer Island-and of Cytherea, the birthplace not only of Aphrodite but of Lafcadio Hern, both hovering on the water as insubstantially as puffs of blue smoke.'
'Every now and then a faint shaft of wind coming from nowhere would blur the smooth surface with a sudden fan of ruffles, and then all would be smooth again, and the boat and its passengers afloat in a blue dimensionless dream.'
(Patrick Leigh Fermor)
"Fantasy, depression and God are all, like blue, in the more mysterious reaches of our consciousness."
(Victoria Finlay)
'Most Germans believe that Hitler had blue eyes, but they were brown. The official portraits of high Nazi officials were often retouched to give them blue eyes and that particular stare, pure and cold as a mountain lake, as a glacier, as a cloudless sky, as the fruit of an imaginary unmixed blood.'
(Eliot Weinberger)
'Not all languages name all colors. Japanese only recently included a word for "blue". In past ages, aoi was an umbrella word that stood for the range of colors from green and blue to violet.'
(Dianne Ackerman)
'A boy accosted us asking for a coin. His face was dark blue like his clothes. He was mule driver and his appearance very similar to the "blue men" who dwell in the south of Atlas. The colour of their dress, we were told, shares the colour of their skin, so in this way, everyone, men and women, are blue. The only blue race.'
(Elías Canetti)
'Blue is a soothing colour for melancholy, it is neutral towards divinity.'
'L'azur vous invite au départ ; il est indiscret, il se mêle de votre vie, il réveille aussi en vous ce qu'il y a de morbide dans vos aspirations religieuses, le côté démoniaque de vos velléités mystiques.'
'Quand on est porté au cafard rien n'y invite autant que le ciel bleu.'
'Dix jours d'azur me mettent dans un état voisin de la folie.'
(Emil Cioran)
'Dans le dégoût la lassitude
De l'indifférente nature
Nous mettrons nos peaux à l'étude
Nous chercherons le plaisir pur
Nos nuits seront des interludes
Dans le calme affreux de l'azur'
(Michel Houellebecq)
'The colour of nothing is blue'
(Charles Simic)
Music by Charles Mingus:
'Orange was the colour of her dress then blue silk'
(Sung Pil-Chao, History of the Blue, 2020)
(Blue Lovers, Marc Chagall)
Strolling around the river gauche at Quai Voltaire I stopped over one of those bouquiniste stands by the Seine to take a quick glance into the bouquins since I hadn't enough time and was strapped for money. But a thick volume in beautiful binding, rose vellum, gold embossed caught my eyes:
"The Correspondence between James Joyce and Clarissa Holloway(1928-1941)
Hogarth Press (so revealed the ex-libris)was the publishing house. Year of issue: 1953.
At first sight I thought it was a long-winded and pedantic essay about the metafictive connection between James Joyce and Virginia Woolf's styles. But when I started to flick through its yellowish pages there was not the slightest doubt: I was reading the crossed letters between a real person and a fictional character from a very famous novel.
Well upon my soul!, I muttered to myself smirking, pretty sure that was only a boutade contrived by some two-bit admirer of Georges Perec.
However, I noticed the book was prefaced by Leonard Woolf himself who spent several years to compile the letters. I read some of them with the growing curiosity of a scholar and that really oozed the aroma of something pukka, not a bogus.
Enthused with such a rare trove, I asked the bouquiniste(an old blue-eyed geezer with grey beret and Quebec's accent) about the book price. He dusted it off examined the first pages like an expert with a magnifying glass, at the same time he tipped the beret over one ear, then over the other like a madman. "40 euros"-suddenly he snapped without raising the eyes from the book. I was surprised, rather expecting a hefty price, maybe 100 euros, even more. Nevertheless, I only had 20 euros on me, so I nearly entreated the bouquiniste not to sell the book to anyone, that I'd be back in a jiffy with the fric. I nipped to the next ATM and withdrew 60 euros.
When I hurried back I came across the same stand, the same books, but not the same bouquiniste: this time I met a young and strapping Senegalese with long and colourful dreadlocks. His dark shades mirrored back my face. A kind of piercing glinted on his lower lip. Sat down on a stool, slouchy, he seemed more interested in selling old postcards about Notre Dame de Paris. I asked him about the old man with grey beret and the book he had put me by. I flaunted my 60 euros. His dark shades reflected the sad and overcast sky of Paris as well. He only grinned and gave me the cold shoulder and after billowing out the smoke from an odorous spliff, he got up to attend a gaggle of Japanese tourists. Disappointed, I asked around all the stands, all the bouquinistes but nobody knew anything about the book, let alone about the blue-eyed old geezer with Quebec's accent.
