medium: ink drawing on paper, digital collageBLUE NIGHT
For Liam Rector
On the plain, a round table
made of ice and on it, a silver
telephone ringing. I answer.
Blue night is coming,
an earthen voice says.
Blue night with a green river of light running through it.
I look up. Beautiful north.
The wind is a long white note.
He tells me the story:
Here the raven came when he stole the moon. Here he changed himself into an emerald leaf. Here he dropped into the woman’s mouth and was born a dark baby with oily eyes. Here, he spent the cold nights in the shelter of his mother’s arms. Here he lay beneath a bear’s hide, his thin long fingers clutching bone toys his grandfather carved. Here he slept, warm and safe, but dreaming of flight. His mother kept the moon hidden inside an ancient jeweled box. One night, he crept from the bed, his mother asleep, and opened it, the moon’s pearl glow lighting his dark face. His arms stretched to black wings again, his nose to beak. The woman awoke, cried, ran to catch him as he flew up through the smoke hole, the bright moon clutched in his mouth.
Now the brown voice, bear voice
is lost in static on the long-distance line.
Above, the blue night is coming,
the cold moon wide as a child’s eye,
the darkness shot with the green river
of the northern lights. And the man
with his black-quill stories is moving off
now across the snowy plain,
a lone bear vanishing into all that white.
- Amy Tudor
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