blue dusk

weekly poem | a nameless blue / that burns / through the mesh of the dark

But First Dear Reader, A Note To You,

In her ‘A Field Guide for Getting Lost,’ Rebecca Solnit writes:

‘For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not.’

Like her, I too have been moved by the blue of edges, depths and edgeless-ness. And it’s not just me. Human beings have chased blue across history, longing to capture and bottle the elusive colour. Some of our ancestors arduously mined and processed the blue gem Lapis Lazuli to create a precious blue pigment that would then be shipped across the ocean. Artists sought patronages to afford this expensive pigment, and used it delicately to paint gods and heavens. (Source)

Blue is rare. Blue is as common as the sky and sea and horizon. Blue is melancholy. Blue is hopeful, when the clouds part after a storm.

Yesterday, I sat down to write a poem. The words arrived haltingly. Then I looked out of the window and saw this:

I was haunted by the shade of blue, by my inability to describe it, by the way it seemed to burn. The poem wrote itself quickly afterwards. Let’s begin.

---

blue dusk

blue dusk. a blue wrapped within blue. 

burnished. blazing. how and when do i begin

to speak of this blueness, this estrangement, 

this in-between hour? the way the thin shadows

lick at the walls, leaping out from places beyond

the imagination? all i know 

is that all of this happens at once: 

the people standing in the waning light

trying to read each other's faces in the dark

before the street lamps come on. 

inside the lonely thrum of crowded buses, 

the passengers lurching forward,

searching for something to hold on to, 

getting on and off at stops they call theirs. 

somewhere in the dim yellow glow 

of a dirty kitchen, someone is rushing 

to stop their tea from boiling over.

somewhere i am trying to grasp 

all that is done and undone

in this blue dusk.  

standing by the darkening square of my window,

i rest my face against my palm and sigh.

the day finishes like it began, 

in a nameless blue 

that burns

through the mesh of the dark.

---

Something about the wild, deep shade of blue made me want to write about fragments of urban life set against dusk. Perhaps the same thing that T.S Eliot set out to capture when he wrote:

Six o’clock. / The burnt-out ends of smoky days. / And now a gusty shower wraps / The grimy scraps / Of withered leaves about your feet / And newspapers from vacant lots; / The showers beat / On broken blinds and chimney-pots, / And at the corner of the street / A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps. / And then the lighting of the lamps.’

So many solitudes are contained in this dusk-hour when the dark and the light negotiate with each other. So many urban estrangements linger within our familiar evening routines. I think of these things when I read Dilip Chitre’s poem ‘Father Returning Home:’

My father travels on the late evening train / Standing among silent commuters in the yellow light / Suburbs slide past his unseeing eyes / His shirt and pants are soggy and his black raincoat / Stained with mud and his bag stuffed with books / Is falling apart. / His eyes dimmed by age / fade homeward through the humid monsoon night. / Now I can see him getting off the train / Like a word dropped from a long sentence.

As I was writing this poem, the colour blue became a liminal space that held all this unfathomable alienation and fragility; feelings that have already been written about by poets better than I. But that’s what we do, isn’t it? Look out of a window and tell the same story over and over again, as though we’re hearing it for the first time.

---

Before You Go …

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Finally, here’s what I’ve been loving on Substack this week:

"...an intentional exercise to write during the hours that Sylvia Plath referred to as blue..." ~ Nicole Tallman | Poet of the Week 5.19.24

Little blue hues and habits that stick

I’ll be back with a new poem next week. Until then, take care,

Love,

Anagha

And out of the invisible, streams of bright blue drops
Rain from the showery heavens, and bright blue crops
Surge from the under-dark to their ladder-tops.

- D. H. Lawrence