EverydayBliss: Red & Blue & Stories about Who We Are

A jumble of colors for this week that seemed to be about color.

Listening to right now: Club des Belugas with Dean Martin

Today's Happiness Formula: Breakfast made outside on the grill with our neighbor -- well, brunch, really.

This poem by Ted Hughes is from his collection Birthday Letters -- a collection, it turns out, that he had been writing since Sylvia Plath's death, when people had assumed he had chosen to never write about her.

One day he walked into his publisher's office and threw a manuscript on the desk, told him to go ahead with it, and walked out the door. The publisher was shocked at the content, to say the least.

Ted died shortly after. That story gives me chills every time.

This particular poem is about story and how sometimes we tell ourselves stories about who we are that are not only untrue but also destructive of our essence.

Red

Red was your colour.
If not red, then white. But red
Was what wrapped around you.
Blood-red. Was it blood?
Was it red-ochre, for warming the dead?
Haematite to make immortal
The precious heirloom bones, the family bones.

When you had your way finally
Our room was red. A judgement chamber.
Shut casket for gems. The carpet of blood
Patterned with darkenings, congealments.
The curtains -- ruby corduroy blood,
Sheer blood-falls from ceiling to floor.
The cushions the same. The same
Raw carmine along the window-seat.
A throbbing cell. Aztec altar -- temple.

Only the bookshelves escaped into whiteness.

And outside the window
Poppies thin and wrinkle-frail
As the skin on blood,
Salvias, that your father named you after,
Like blood lobbing from a gash,
And roses, the heart's last gouts,
Catastrophic, arterial, doomed.

Your velvet long full skirt, a swathe of blood,
A lavish burgundy.
Your lips a dipped, deep crimson.
You revelled in red.
I felt it raw -- like the crisp gauze edges
Of a stiffening wound. I could touch
The open vein in it, the crusted gleam.

Everything you painted you painted white
Then splashed it with roses, defeated it.
Leaned over it, dripping roses,
Weeping roses, and more roses,
Then sometimes, among them, a little blue
bird.

Blue was better for you. Blue was wings.
Kingfisher blue silks from San Francisco
Folded your pregnancy
In crucible caresses.
Blue was your kindly spirit -- not a ghoul
But electrified, a guardian, thoughtful.

In the pit of red
You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness.

But the jewel you lost was blue.