Blueprint

As I lay on the prickly grass, grasshoppers chattered
in my hair. I stroked the ground like a beard. No one
sang. The whole sky was watching. It’s animal
piss in the dye pot that makes indigo blue. Blue
seeped out of me, but I wanted to forge it myself.
I was obsessed with making. The yellow leaves
browned; the sugar pine needles refused
to shed. I couldn’t get the pigment right, it kept turning
to mud. I had attempted this before, making wine
from another’s body, stamping and stomping
my grape-stained feet. When I rose, I left the print
of a woman behind. I noticed the pear tree, how it gave
without question; I asked anyway, was asking
again, collecting broken seashells and tiny
elephant figurines. I needed a herd of blue.
I soaked black beans for the color they left. My blue
was a habit, a kind of river I stepped into—sometimes
crossed—because it held the sky so perfectly.
I swung the axe. I swam with my arms.
I hammered nails—though crookedly. Timber
was my sacrum, timber were my metatarsals,
timber was my lungs’ pink flesh, timber was my skull.
I was a blueprint, blue on blue, mapless
but for those warm bones and my red heart barking.
—And when I turned without making my skirt
a basket, when I turned from all the fallen
pears, the sky was full of shaking: wet
with river-water. It wasn’t rain that fell—whatever it was
I collected in the cups of my hands.