Azul (Final Version) Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

[for the great and highly lyrical Spanish poet, Juan Ramon Jimenez (1881-1958) ]

Juan Ramon standing amid blue flowers
did not hear me calling;
small birds flew on every side

through chinks in a chain-link cloud and over
the scuttled rainbows of your sighs
I picked up on the ground
to far-away laughter.

oh, but 'not-it' I cried out from
the space left by your shadow
on the grass

like a child in a game of tag,
the last one left in the
blonde and feathered fields still

unashamed to say I love you
starlight by the railroad tracks
and hotel rolls with real pats of butter-
at home in the pink stucco of 'play-like' afternoons...

Sr. Jiminez, bluer than the bluest
shadows could be,
could it be the earth is disenchanted?
will we grow apart?

stand still, I said, with a mouthful of pins
I will sew your shadow to the sky
and line it with pale green stars

it's strange while
I'm still living, trying to speak
in lilies and small roses
in blue diamonds secretly
distinctly...

oh why do you keep on
haunting your own poems
it hurts so much

even in my minted sleep or
is it, dream?
to be crumpling up the violet
of mimeographed vocabulary lists
again-

and practicing
balletic leaps by the
persimmon trees

it's not that I'm that far
from all those merry dialogues
about butter about arroz con
pollo about beaten chocolate-

but only this
through all these mists-
regarding time, I find it hard to keep
the tenses straight:

do I keep breaking the heart of moonlight
without knowing why-
or is all that hushed?
and may I pray to God in
pure hibiscus, too?

entenderás...

a hundred years from home
no one recognized my speech
but the blue wind and God
and the tire-swing swung

in glittering silence by the
small girl dressed in
blue porous happiness...

mary angela douglas april 26-april 28,2011; 3 october 2023

Note: for anyone who needs to know 'azul' means blue in Spanish. A kind of heavenly blue I think of regarding the poet, a Marian blue perhaps (Mary, the mother of Jesus) a paler shade maybe sky blue, the lighter blue of certain wildflowers. I do not mean blue in the sense of melancholy, but only of beauty and delight. Which is how I always felt reading his poems in high school in bilingual translation.

and entenderas in the familiar form means in the future, you will understand...which is what I imagine in the poem, Juan Ramon Jimenez says to me, or the ghost of Juan Ramon Jiminez