I Write this Ghazal So I Won’t Have to Think about What’s Really Happening – Pam Davenport

What bliss there is in blueness.  ~Vladimir Nabokov

Blue dawn air, blue rooftops, the hazy hour, nothing is sharp—​
giant violet mums, my attempt at adornment, are obscured by neighbors’ blue tarp.

I have let my neighbors vex me, not complained of gunshots and fires—​
now all I see, their carport and a card table, a few boxes, hidden behind askew tarp.

Fine shelter at construction sites for dry wall or cement or a home after a hurricane—​
in a tent on a rainy night I have said grace for the loan of a nearly-new tarp.

Civil War soldiers carried bibles in tarred haversacks—​
but this isn’t war, just a flapping plastic to ruin my view tarp.

The beauty of blue, of tzitzit, olivewing, of a velvet dress my mother sewed—​
Picasso’s guitar, indigo mood, silk surging over a thigh, or a mildewed tarp.

Oxygen, being blue, if we could see it, like seawater or mountain sky—​
Izu’s photos, bodies covered in cobalt cyanotype, yet I eschew this tarp.

My yellow wallpaper, the beating of an old man’s heart, cadmium—​
my trigger could be my bliss, ‘tis nothing, Davenport, but a tattered blue tarp.