BLUE
Walking up five flights in a spiral stairway
in the Marais, I recall how
water lifted me up when I was a girl
back in Michigan, a state so great with lakes
my mother assured me there’d always be fresh water,
tide-less waves, an infinite series, a liquid
eternity in Grand Haven where I floated all summer
sans curfew or fear of contagion.
It’s dark this fall in Paris, cafés closed,
Covid on the rise again. The cloud ceiling hovers,
gray and damp, the tap water is chalky with calcium.
Down in the street, rue Rambuteau, yellow vested
citizens protest confinement, capitalism. God knows
nothing is perfect, not even this gilded city where
the church stone is heavy as the news from home.
I’m blue, yes, but even I have to admit
Parisian light is a full-on cliché
in a sky low enough to suggest reachable perfection.
Heaven isn’t an actual place
but sometimes
when an impulse fires azure through my optic nerve
I can feel it, or when,
at the end of a long and troubled poem,
a barbed thrill catches me in the chest—
a fishhook in the jaw of a bluegill, panicked,
flapping, slick, pulled from Gull Lake for breakfast.
There are cities in Michigan with no drinkable water.
My nerves carry this thirst forward in time
the way gravitational waves
convey suns and planets through outer space.
Tonight, the great blue dome over Paris
is torn open just far enough
to let the moon and Mars shine through.
The stars are pure theory,
dispersing at light speed along with the universe.
Mary Peelen
MARY PEELEN is the author of Quantum Heresies, winner of the Kithara Book Prize. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Michigan Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco and Paris.