Begin in Blue

The blue of her robe... reads above all as a flat silhouetted shape—a deep infinite midnight blue, large enough to lose ourselves in... this very dark blue creates unparalleled effects...almost of hypnotic trance; it is as though we are being invited to worship not so much the Madonna as the Blue.

—Timothy Hyman, Sienese Painting

I'm reading John Wieners chapbook, Pressed Wafer, at one of the giant tables upstairs in the archives where I work, when a visiting scholar asks for help with research. And that's how I learn that, in 1882, landscape architects at the University of California designed a eucalyptus grove for the Berkeley campus (a grove through which I walk once a week). Tasmanian blue gum trees were planted as a windbreak for the cinder running track. They grew and grew, non-natives making themselves at home. To one who'd never seen a eucalyptus tree, the grove must have smelled like cough drops.

Wieners was a Boston boy. Later, in San Francisco, he wore blue eye shadow and sold heroin packed in matchboxes the size of a palette of eye shadow—false eyelashes, glued one above the other on his forehead—cockeyed Caucasian—

Eyelids the color and shape of the leaves of the blue eucalyptus near the track where the beautiful athlete, also a Joseph, also a John, breathing hard after a sprint, does not look up at the plane from Boston passing over the track—

Boys in California know nothing of priests in long skirts shoveling snow, winters invented by Emily Dickinson—

The Blacks and the blues,
the grove as artifice—

In Berkeley, Robert Creeley recorded a version of "A Poem for Painters":

"With want of it"—
"despair is on my face"—
"showered by the scent of the finish line"—

The golden boys protected by tall trees—
blue blood—blue eucalyptus—blue-lined paper—
"beginning with violet. I begin in blue"—
"My middle name is Joseph"—

*

Sanskrit "vaka"
"wat" (temple)
"grove" (copse, thicket)—
A coppice—spinney—brake—for the broken—

A grove: a stand of trees with little or no undergrowth—So here's the floor, all clear and still, a thicket—"cold hell"—

Grave Love Leaves

Torn tickets in the eucalyptus leaves, pants in the trees—

Who walks through the grove in winter rain? Pants decomposing in the decomposing leaves—pants, and a dog—

This was after the picturesque era, before Free Speech—"Books in the running brooks," books in the trees—

*

Strawberry Creek roars with the snowmelt coming down from Truckee. The train back to Boston leaves at 3:00.

Across the "enormous" country—passing a car filled with Beats, ascending, going where Beats don't go—

Climbing into the mountains he leans out the window, his ears pasted back like a dog's—like a dog, submissively free— submission is different when there's no force.

In the Rockies they close the windows now because so many travelers have been decapitated leaning out to see the trees—but the windows were open then, so he looked—looked—looked—

Source: Wite Out: Love and Work (Hanging Loose Press, 2021)