David Goldstein
Xerces blue, Acmon blue, Iridaceae. Blue appalling blue,
restoration blue. Matrilineal blue, hydraulic blue, grasses in a blue
rage. Dune grasses speak
blue. Blue body, all over fingers
blue. Some kind of blue, there is no blue that does not see you. Kerchief blue, palatalized blue. Lessingia blue, Blue Lobos Creek, San Francisco blue, Extinction blue.
Carapace blue, color of money. In 1994, a thin strip of land. Weed blue. Blue
of transference, alone blue. Flows
down to the sea under a baseball-blue field. Extirpation blue, Pheres blue, high-traffic
interpretive. Pickleweed seed out
of the acid ocean, Salicornica blue
on blue. WeÕll wait for the
evergreens to die before pulling them.
Gossamer blue beyond city limits. The monk-blight city of San Francisco, sea-blite the stateÕs
rarer plants. Phases of
restoration, political blue, Xerces blue, the extinct, the blue the world no
longer conjures. Rat blue. The vast return of tomcat clover. A quarter stuck in the sand. Scale blue, mitigation blue. Autumn of dogs, seed collars. Code blue.
Remnant blue, the
papers of Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr. Blue endemic. The relatives of undevelopment. Presidio manzanita barely. Shade blue. Hazardous waste, a blues tune: 80,000 pounds, beach-strewn. Lobos blue flowers down to the
sea. There is no blue that does
not. Dispersion blue, lucky
construction crews laid new pipe.
Hypothetical blue.
When the monks draw breath, they become a way
to skate on the creases of rocks.
There it was, you again, the lost one. We walked away, holding the body that had been left us. The barefoot doctor. The one tending the crops. Sadness is the kind of thing this house
does not discuss. A song of paper. An opera written on the left thigh of a
ghost.
The West Haven cabbages, renowned for their
disappearance. The dragonfly with
whom you fell in love. Of course I
was the lost one, not you, marooned on the gurney. Breath the column of addiction, tallied and uncouth. Twelve breaths, four breaths,
five. We might as well invite the
small cries of metal and stone, for they were teachers to the deep.
Why do you think I am writing now? For you said, go and pressure this
space. You said, everyone needs to
be underwater. You said, I have to
deal with growth. The punctured
lung. The ways of taking
leave. A boy in Hunan discovers
rice hidden in a folksong, puts on his hyaline coat. You said, what would it be like if I did not fear my body?
Here is a key aspect
of ghost opera: when you are done, it is celebration, but no one is left. You find the asphyxiated flies, the
missing epinephrine. You craved
ancestry, craved music. You said,
go down and rejoice. You said,
sitting outside a Paris cafˇ.
Another aspect of ghost opera: it is never finished. It is the permission of summer.