Ray Sharp and Jennifer Fendya

Jennifer Fendya
Inspiration piece

Bluet No. 665
By Ray Sharp
Response

You came to me, yellow butterfly,
flitting the deep blue sky of my golden summer.

Love bloomed
a thousand dandelions.

You grew sunflowers
and staked them outside the kitchen window
as fall turned to winter.

I was your chickadee,
black cap pulled low.

I bought you sunflower-yellow paint
for the kitchen
even though I said it would be easier
to keep every room off-white
with blue trim

Like we were wrapped in the Finnish flag —
a blue cross on a field of white.

I shouldered the weight of blue,
bore it as it bent me forward.

Bent me like a gospel plow
is bent by blue boulders.

All your yellow
couldn’t cover my true-blue name,
letters blue-inked under my thin skin.

A tangle of blue parachute chord.

A spray of light-blue forget-me-nots
among the yellow-hearted trilliums
in the shade of June maples.

Black-blue sheen of feathers,
a crow pecking all the yellow stars to coal.

Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
1492 ways to say I’m sorry.

All apologies to Kurt Cobain
and Joni Mitchel and Miles Davis.

And to Sir Isaac Newton.
How we tried to meet at green.

Robert Frost said nothing gold can stay,
but green, too soon, gives way
to the blue glow of snow.

And, of course, to Maggie Nelson,
but most of all to you.
I try and try to shine,
to reflect your light,
but how can I make another happy

When I can’t do the same for myself?

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