(growing Pains) Blue Poem by Janice Windle

Blue was his colour, he always said. Went with his ice-blue Michael Caine eyes.

Midnight blue velvet suit, in the seventies, their twenties. (She stroking nightly its nap as they sat on her hard two-seater sofa, until he exposed the smooth contrast of the skin beneath.)

His wedding suit a sky-blue linen creation. (Her parents late to the ceremony, she, tearstained at the flower-decked registry office table, hearing her mother breathe, ”Isn’t he beautiful”)

Cerulean and cobalt shirts in the eighties (pure cotton, hell to iron, but hell, she was still in love.)

Prussian blue golf shoes and an ultramarine Armani fleece in the nineties, as far as she could recall.

He bought her a cloud-blue Honda car to do the shopping in, just before she decided to head off into the blue.

In it, she struck out on a polychrome adventure, alone, drove towards the lurid sunset to look for gold at the end of her rainbow.

When they met again, she saw that at some point his eyes had faded to grey, along with their hair.

Blue was still his colour.