Bending into Blue: Epilogue to The Edge of Somewhere Deep
Bending into Blue
At a familiar rest stop on the runway facing the rainbow:
That colored airway that frolics from the edge
and bends across the the gorge of somewhere deep,
I sat with my travels.
On my lap, a stack of maps and notes
About take off and landing
And the sensation of buoyancy
That memorializes flight.
Given the accumulating weight of my wanderings,
Failed flights, and brutal landfalls,
Another planned departure might have been grounded
But I sat with my trials and focused on the light
Unfailingly, the rainbow did its work
The palpitating pink
The wavering grey
And a newly visible blue beyond
No time transpired before my talons were digging
Into the corrugated path for one more launch into color.
This time, I skidded after it shamelessly,
Called out for it in soprano.
Headlong and hasty,
I lifted right off the muddy grooves with cruddy claws
Not realizing the edge was now much further up ahead
Not noticing the ground, green and boundless below my feet
This time, like other times, I came back to the edge specifically for the rainbow.
With eyes wide lit and newly flecked with blue
I hit the rainbow head on and hovered
Staining me deep through the tissues with its noisy hues
This time, like no other time, when the colors were finished with me
The blue, that had been beyond, began to bend with me
It caught and accompanied me so knowingly
And with that single ascent, I was home.
Back on that airstrip of longing
The pink did her duties of drawing me in
I know now, that all along, the pink was you
The grey reflected the scribbles then piled on my lap
Lessons now embodied in my readiness to depart
And the blue, beyond the billowing bands of color curved
That blue that held the rainbow, was me and you
Now, what is the work of inhabiting flight?
A warrant of arrival breathes hot at my neck like a prayer:
Teach me to hover, to yield to the rainbow, and bend into blue.
Teach me to sustain and renew this view, above the expanding grasslands of tenderness.
”Bending Into Blue'“ is Epilogue to a four part series of verses written in the fall and winter of 2017. You can visit them and experience the full story of The “Edge of Somewhere Deep” at the links below this photo of the colors of home:
Sunset in Redlands, California