Minuet on A Blue Flower

A blue rush of feeling
from the veins of the heart
has slipped into my pounding arteries like
a long-craved, long-resisted
drug:


Ah. Now slides
into tiny capillaries
where it slow-dances in fits and starts
to the old tune of pain's pretty minuet,
playing on nerves stretched taut.


- in minor key:


my pretty pretty humming bird
out in the blue-blossomed vines
shimmering through a filmy haze
of warm honey and sun in a daze
soon your dizzy heart too will pine


and wilt away in the sunless days,
for a season lost in time-


And the blue flower then will scarcely remember
that you flitted, unflinching, by his side
till he fell from the bough one November,


And he will rise like a blue flame come spring,
and open again his heart to the sky
No memory of one little humming-bird nigh
who sang till she could no more sing
then lay and folded her wings and died.