Peter Richards

All the unseated blue in the world.
Some concessions for blue.
How blue flakes away into blue.
The ageing of blue.
Dismissed cravings of blue.
And nothing so remote as a blue.
The penchant in blue insisting on blue.
Daisies are blue.
Blue in between when nothing will come.
The blue pulse in a lie.
Rifts.
This solvent is blue.

The Some-whats have come to persuade me.
They drag three gowns unfolding my Mass face—
the drawstring ravels no ashes at all . . .
The Some-whats have come to convey me.
Waters are tepid, careful, and I walk on the waters—
a pond with your name drank from these woods.
With their long and lute fed black sponge of hair
the Some-whats are bending to bathe me—
a trickle of three days for the back of my neck,
a night once known and not how it seems
washes what washes away,
all but the last things washing away.
I'm told to crawl inside and leave those hoods behind.
I'm told to lie quiet— pretending is good.
Among these there's a petal that's you.
I bend for the petal that's me.
Find each petal bending for me.
I say "pretty." I'm allowed to say pretty.
It tickles, this hill. This sprinkle of flowers.
This all-along-a-hill slow bending for me.

Now all I see are orange circles
arousing themselves against a high pylon
of days.
In the first place
we have no place else to go,
and in the second, we've aligned ourselves
behind the protective malaise
of our amazement—
an old haze rising
on a day that makes amends
by making every day that follows
the inside of all the broken circles,
where construction on the orange ones
must beg to begin—
where shards from a chipped tooth are ground into powder
and rubbed with design along the outside rims,
rims that mimic the trembling eyelid of God,
a god that pleads "No, no . . . not in my sleep . . ."
then sends ripples across the waters of his own device—
ripples turn into waves
consuming the villages
where bowls get made.
Though it's no catastrophe
when I cut my lip on the edge,
when drops of blood splatter the page
drying in orange circles
that keep the page from turning.

There is a nude siren in the jelly.
She cannot sing, she is dissolving.
During plantation song
she never struck me in secret.
She did strike me in the Patio of Oranges
as an anxious colonnade soldier
half way touching the assembled.
The new balcony powder falls to her eyelids.
Let her hind legs be accepted.
They lived here.
They raised good hind leg children
and leave the earth pilfering
only small handfuls of math.
They do not perceive death as vehicular
but rely on soft lickings to transfer
one life onto another.
There is a nude siren in the jelly.
She cannot sing, she is dissolving.
Her nakedness has no place in my poem.
Her breasts appear generally happy.
They seem full of self-awareness
and unafraid of the note I place between them.

The thought of my violin sonata
jangles on a wagon asleep with the places.
Sleep accepts this place slightly created.
Modicums do war beyond the places.
About their objectives it has nothing to say—
there exist three shades of love.
As if wondering, they follow the wagon
up through the helpless mountain.
A fourth shade laggards behind,
a lurch for the wagon I drew.
She looks to be mist regarding its plume.
Mist feeds on the rays dead to the gazer below.
He can hear shade taking shape from a hole,
not procedures of shade strung to the hole.