#bluets

Scene I.
 
We have placed un-bloomed
flowers from the farmer’s market
Francie works at in California
on the windowsill. They are a dull
green, but they seem blue. Blue
is the color of loss and loss
is the shade of love in February.
Central Park is a frosted bluet
and she stopped
breathing forty minutes ago.
Now her body is just still
and Maine grey sky pale on the bed.
People are beginning to disperse—
puffy paper eyes,
sweating hot but trembling cold.
People are going home to shower,
to breathe, to escape the claustrophobia
of this room, the expanse of loss
in this city. I will stay, I sob to the few
remaining.I don’t want her to be alone.
I am shaking, and caught in the gap
between losing and lost, in a reality
where she is pleading stay stay staywithout
mouthing the words. She is too proud
to plead, but I know it is human to ask this.
So I sit beside her for hours while the calm
Jewish man who has been sent to cover
and move her is stuck in the yellow space
of traffic, on the salted Brooklyn bridge.
My dad and uncle and two aunts and two cousins
stay too. We are the waiters: edged against
the windowsill, curved against a flat white wall.
We leave last. We say goodbye in threes. Gulp
our breath, walk outside, and blow blue air before
squeezing into a cab and trailing the thawing
Hudson to her apartment. 

“‘What would criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place?’ For this isn’t just a matter of how to write good criticism, or how to keep criticism in its allegedly proper place (i.e., subservient to the genius art that gives it rise). It’s also an ethical matter, insofar as Sontag’s question reminds us that the world doesn’t exist to amplify our own preexisting tastes, values, or predilections. It simply exists. We don’t have to like all of it, or remain mute in the face of our discontent. But there’s a difference between going to art with the hope that it will reify a belief or value we already hold, and feeling angry or punitive when it doesn’t, and going to art to see what it’s doing, what’s going on, treating it as a place to get 'the real and irregular news of how others around us think and feel,’ as Eileen Myles once put it.”

-Maggie Nelson, from On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint