Karen George

Ode to Blue
 
Why do I find the colour blue so exquisite? Viewing blue make me feel serene, happy, soft and kind, full of wonder. Turns out the clear day sky, deep sea, and blue eyes are only optical effects. Historically, blue was the most expensive pigment, created from the rare lapis lazuli gemstone. The Blessed Virgin Mary usually wears blue, and it came to suggest holiness, humility, virtue, but it’s also associated with harmony, infinity, imagination, sadness, the cold. Blue appears in some of my favorite flowers: clematis, columbine, hydrangea, iris, forget-me-nots, love-in-a-mist. In ancient Egypt, blue was used in burials to protect the dead in the afterlife. And why is blue on white so pleasing, as in Chinese porcelain, Delft earthenware, British Wedgewood. Some believe blue improves blood pressure, heart rate, mental clarity, spiritual growth. My husband and I meditated on blue. Blue leaves me dreamy, as if gazing into Van Gogh’s night skies, Monet’s blue water lilies—buoyant. 
 
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Do You Remember
 
Sucrets Antiseptic Throat Lozenges that came in a 3 ¼ by 2 ½-inch beige & navy hinged metal tin with rounded corners? In the 1950s, 45 cents for 24 individually wrapped—minty menthol that cooled, soothed your mouth & throat. Mom filled the emptied tins with buttons sorted by colour, labeled in all caps on a strip of masking tape, kept them in the sewing room built in our lower-level stairwell—a small, cool, secret space I adored.
 
She taught me to sew at the age of eight, at ten the special stitch to create the hole a button would be pushed through to secure a garment on one’s body. 
 
O, to hold each tin in my palm, shake it lightly left to right, echoey sound, click it open, finger each jewel—flat to shank to stud to toggle types, with two to five holes, tiny to oversized—circle, oval, square, rectangle, triangle; made of plastic, glass, wood, metal, shell, bone, leather, fabric.
 
O, to touch those buttons nestled in tins as I dreamt of fabrics they might be attached to: mother-of-pearl on a silk blouse with lace collar, gold anchor buttons on a navy wool pea jacket with epaulets, tortoiseshell ones on a double-breasted ivory linen blazer. But what buttons did Mom sew to the wool tartan plaid skirt she planned—purple crossed with fuchsia, turquoise, amber? 
 
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The Outside Bleeds In
 
In dreams, I walk many houses, beginning with the home I lived in until the age of five, the one my father and nine siblings grew up in, rooms I barely recall but for one with sheet-covered furniture, another with wallpaper of tiny roses, me standing bedside for a last visit with Grandma Alma, her pinned-up braids framing her face. 
 
Houses I never lived in haunt me—old, many-storied ones unoccupied for decades—version of a home I once occupied, but the décor doesn’t match my memory, as if a surrogate of me lives there.
 
Ceilings, walls, floors breached—bleeding the outside in. Kudzu creeps across floors, ceilings. Paint peels off walls in surreal patterns. Dusty, discoloured floor tiles. In my dreams, I don’t suffer from allergies. I’ve entered a parallel world.  
 
A central courtyard holds massive palms, kapok, banana trees. Level with my eyes, a nest of three naked hatchlings, beaks stretched open in bloodcurdling screeches—lurid yellow mouths jarring.
 
**
 
What Sparks a Memory
 
A lark of the eye, an illusion of the moment, as when you take a photo of the full moon perched on your roof peak or centered in your bedroom windowpane cradled in the arms of a winter sycamore—moments that nourish, enchant you. As when in a darkened theatre, a man with long gray hair reading poetry reminds you of your grandmother Clara, gone thirty years—his face, his voice, morphed to her telling me a story.
 
When you open a friend’s latest novel, you meet a feisty older character Vivian, the name of your mother who died at the pandemic’s onset, how you loved seeing, reading her name and adventures, the way the novel carried her back to you.
 
The server at the restaurant where your fiction group meets is named Vivian, and when you or others say her name, a nudge of joy rises in you. This Vivian is young and lovely, makes you picture how beautiful your mother was. Your surprise when posted images of her return as Facebook memories—a jab of sadness quelled with bliss. You share them again, so they’ll spiral back next year.
 
When you read a friend’s poem that mentions seeds of Vivian lettuce, an heirloom romaine you’ve never heard of, a hum of comfort thrums through you, blooms a memory of the lettuce your mother’s mother Clara grew near her porch—the day she uprooted a head, how it tasted exquisitely crisp, bursting in your mouth like the vivid rhythm of her name, Clara, and her daughter’s, Vivian.
 
**
 
Raven at Red River Gorge
 
Perched high in a hemlock, deep shade punctured by needles of sunlight, the raven grooms, cranes its neck, plunges beak in glossy blue-black feathers, extends a wing to reach under. I’m fifteen feet away on a lodge’s second story balcony overlooking the Red River. When other birds tweet, the raven’s head jerks in that direction, beak agape as a child’s mouth lapses open when rapt in a task. 
            
Midday thickens around me. Through my camera zoom lens, I watch the raven scan left and right before cawing. It repeats the sequence, tail bobbing, body puffed up with the effort of four deep notes that echo through the canopy. Cicadas’ crescendo rises and falls as if in applause. Another raven, further away, answers. I await the moment the raven lifts off, the wings clap air.
 
**
 
Funnel Tide Green
 
Words you say as you wake from the eye of the hurricane, the lull before the back side. How a dream, and sometimes life, is like a funnel, a tunnel you fall into, climb out of. Nightmares Mom couldn’t escape. All she wanted was sleep, but feared what would come for her. Began checking her watch, hours beforehand, panic rising like a tidal wave, the thick slick of it. What overcame you right before they started anesthesia for your knee replacement. Something told you no, a voice, an instinct you wished you’d followed.
 
Your thoughts funnel, spiraling, hard to break from. You try to fall back asleep, way too early to rise for the day. Your shoulder aches, your hip, back. In one more day you’ll head for the Florida Panhandle, the gulf that gathered the water, induced by heat, to create the vortex.
 
How a body makes its own tide—the water aerobics class where we strode around the pool perimeter, faster, faster, making a riptide that carried you along until the instructor yelled reverse, when you turned the opposite direction, you hit a brick wall of water.
 
You learned to swim at five, loved it, but learned its power when your family visited the ocean,  waves knocked you down, tumbled you onto shore. The time at the waterpark slide, another child followed too fast behind you, landed on top of you, arms and legs not yours, you out of breath, unable to find air.
 
Was that how sleep was for Mom those last years of depression and worsening COPD? You vowed to make her life the best you could after Dad died. You still wonder if you could have done more, eased those final years. Depression you couldn’t control any more than she could.
 
a tunnel, a funnel, 
an open, grasping maw,
a gaping gullet.
 
**
 
Karen George is author of the poetry collections Swim Your Way Back (2014), A Map and One Year (2018), Where Wind Tastes Like Pears (2021), Caught in the Trembling Net (2024), and forthcoming Delight Is a Field (Shanti Arts). She won Slippery Elm’s 2022 Poetry Contest, and her award-winning short story collection, How We Fracture, was released by Minerva Rising Press in January 2024. Her poetry appears in The Ekphrastic Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Lily Poetry Review, and Poet Lore. Her website is https://karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/.