by Richard Garcia

**Richard Garcia** received a MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College Writer's Program in 1994. His latest book of poetry, · and

The blueness reaches from horizon to horizon

wrapping everything in blueness,

poppy fields, a prisoner hanging from his wrists

in Alabama sunshine that I heard about

on the morning news. Is there hope for us?

The phrase, Se frego la cosa is stuck in my brain

and I am trying to resist the temptation

to rhyme it with Julius LaRosa, but who

would remember him? Such buttery

memories I have that dribble down the sky

giving it a sickly green tinge, like those strange

Jerusalem sunsets when we lay expertly pleasing

each other like a single serpent devouring itself.

Now the wind shakes the palm outside the window

so soothingly flapping the blueness back.

This time it's a thin, almost invisible blue

just this side of whiteness, barely audible,

and I want to lie on the carpet with you listening

to whatever blue is saying now. Remember

the first dream is what it says: the closet, the pile

of shoes and the bones you found underneath.

The hell with that. Just look at this sky will you,

how it covers us with its soft, blue fabric of illusion.