the white blues (out of the blue)

Ice-blue eyes squint beneath

white sky, want to close against

white streets turning black beneath

people moving slowly through January.

Two long toes of a sugar beet plant spew white smoke,

poke up through the blue sky edge of a cloud blanket,

white sheet unable to stretch far enough west to cover

the feet of a sleeping town.

To this bright blue gap the eyes rise

before resting on anything white, try to fly

out this window to invisible western mountains.

But perched in a skull on the eastside of town,

they cannot see the icy peaks promising sea

a thousand miles beyond their snowy seam. Instead

eyes close and look inside, find a mindscape

just as white as land and sky today. This hidden sight

rides any willing memory: restless horses

wild eyed with pining, despair straining

to flee, to be anywhere but endless fields of white,

trying to run through some man’s sky-blue eyes

unable to receive their flight. The horses

rear and cry for all the empty places of life. 

Not empty like hunger or angst, but empty

like snow, crystals of water full of space and cold,

refracting light. It is space that takes the flake’s radial shape,

shining as it melts away. Space that makes the eyes too free

to know what or where to think, seek blue. The space

around the horses doesn’t blink. The eyes can’t ride

away. They open, become this I writing in ink, and suddenly

I am space taking a drink of peppermint tea. And space

crossing her legs trying not to think about the space

between his ebbing eyes and the melting

ice of mine.  The blue sky retreats. Go ahead and cry.

This is all I know to write when there is this much white

and I can’t see beyond the space inside the radiating pattern

of me:  warming, spreading, heading toward every sea.