vehicle

Vehicle

Call us another taxi, and we'll go

haring off somewhere, on some street where the

lights run in long lines along the silty pavement.

Pavements that are only blue powders, all

shaded differently in sandy spirals of

light and dark, bloom and brighten in the

rain. The spotty saturation seeps through azure,

which becomes ultra; indigo, which

becomes midnight.


"Blue as the moon,"

the image so overused and passed about

like raffle tickets- blue like cheese, a blue-cheese

moon. A blue-balled lottery winner, waving

a golden ticket. It blew us away,

so blue, that lost blue of Bleus, as in cordon,

as in sacred. They all run together,

blue-black mud slopping tires, pedestrian pantlegs.


And the Bleu whorl of stars, above the zaggy, dark

shapes- towers and church bells impinging damply

upon the clear canvass- There! A belfry

full of sparkling golden bats, all whirring

and swirling up around the sickle-blue

crescent. While we have an awful tendency

to stare down wells, looking for blue faces and

giant dippers, above us a bear may

chase a bowman in a cacaophony

of flutterings.


We stare and lean over

further, grasping the hairy rope, the

shadow tunneling our faces and

furrowing our brows. A moon that is Bleu-

a grappa-colored catwalk, built by the

handless. Don't look- it's the wing, the

fusilage, the nose of our vehicle

that frightens, that fails us. Just stare


and stand with body tilted forward-

on the nose, the very nose- nose to nose

with starry cold explosions, with the

startling Bleu grimace- the serenity

of that iris. Face to face with ice

and moonrocks. Head up, in the oxygenless

air; a soft, needly, breezeless calm.


No need to look down. It's the size of it all that

brings the fear. It's the line of blue-meets-Bleu-

land and sky. It's the haziness of lines

that you know are roads, of bugs that scamper-

the mites and motes on

the misty, grey-blue surface-

The Bleu surface.