青い花

We are near waking when we dream we are dreaming.

What is the true colour of your feelings, when you sit alone in your room and sip your tea, the lights dimmed, the moon broken? As the hours twist and fall gently away, the reflection of your face pale, just visible on the cold windowpane, yet more real, and more beautiful than anything else in the world. Are your eyes green or brown? I forget. Or maybe with time they've changed. But what does remain the same, tell me? And nothing was in the details anyway. The snow was general all over, blinding me at first, until I awoke from this dream in which I was dreaming of you.

And you, yourself: a darker shade of white? Parts of your heart darker than the rest. Not to speak of. How strange, patching up the tear, preparing ourselves in shadows for the new life, unimaginable though it may be. This exile, this island-life, the blue all around me, never inside me.

It was evening, and the sea and sky were one.

Sea and sky were one blue flag, with no design
but for the darker bluer line
but no matter what we do
you can't be me.

I've gathered all your pictures and stored them for safe-keeping in a box, cross my heart and hope to die. So that (when) the time comes. Then the hand will know what the eye could only see.

I think of you, of love, that foreign flower.
The music stops. Come close.

(John Riley, Don Paterson, Novalis)