lambarices

Today I receive a postcard of
a blue guitar. Here snow falls with wings,
tumbling in its feathered body, melting
on the window glass. How each evening becomes
another beautiful woman holding
the color of expensive sapphires
against her throat, I’ll never know.
It is an ordinary clarity.

So then was it music?
Something like love or
words, a sentimental moment once
years ago, that blue sky?

How soon the sky and I have grown apart.
On the postcard, an old man hangs
half-dead, strung over his instrument, and what
I have imagined is half-dead, too. Our bones
end hollow, sky blue; the flute comes untuned.

Erin Belieu, All Distance