Ultra Blue, page 3
In the smoke
Trying to calm us
I am in the fresh past
I am in the wedge of birds
Splitting open the dim
And cluttered sky
Full of sorrow
Full of joy
The world is complete without you
Which is why you have to
Try everything
To stay in it
The flowers are
Pink oracle
You’re gifted
A green stem
And now you need to
Keep it or
Not keep it
The birds the deer
Inventing games to
Deceive their hunger
Bright dreams adorning
Real objects
Where is the kite
Whose shadow falls here
If the blade comes
To gather up blossoms
If the boy’s hand is
Squeezed three times
Before it slips away
Add my love
To the history of love
NOTES & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Ultra Blue is deeply indebted to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, ou De l’éducation. These poems are, in part, a record of my readings of the original 1762 text and Allan Bloom’s 1979 translation (Penguin Classics).
The two sets of “divinations” that appear in this manuscript are made using the changing positions of Starlink satellites to select words from the transcript of conservative commentator Tucker Carlson’s interview of social media influencer and self-styled “king of toxic masculinity,” Andrew Tate. The interview originally appeared on X/Twitter on July 11, 2023.
The lines “A knot is never / Nearly right” and “A knot is either perfect or / Hopelessly wrong” make reference to a passage from The Ashley Book of Knots (Clifford W. Ashley, 1944):
“A knot is never ‘nearly right’; it is either exactly right or it is hopelessly wrong, one or the other; there is nothing in between.”
The epigraph by Thomas Moore is from his essay “Little Boy Found,” which originally appeared in Boyhood, Growing Up Male: A Multicultural Anthology (The Crossing Press, 1993).
The epigraph by Rousseau is from Émile, ou De l’éducation. The translation is my own.
Excerpts from this book have appeared in CV2, Farewell Transmission, and Fou. Thanks to everyone involved in those publications.
I owe deep gratitude to my family, friends, and community whose love and support have made this work possible: to John Deming, Mark Bibbins, Melinda Wilson, Peter Bogart Johnson, Jackie Clark, Seth Fishman, Lo Naylor, and Trey Beck; to Georgia Russell and Raúl Illarramendi; to Fawn Parker; to Benoît, Julia, Steve, Erica, Matthias, and Céline; to Leslie Joy Ahenda, Kevin Connolly, and everyone at House of Anansi; to the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; to Auvézère Mayne Football Club; to Shona and my parents; to Alice, endlessly, and to Pascale and Emile.
© Cris Bastiane GRAEME BEZANSON is a Nova Scotian writer who spent the past eleven years living in rural France. A graduate of Mount Allison University, he later earned an MFA in poetry from The New School in New York City. His work has appeared widely in Canada, the USA, and Europe in places like BOMB, Sixth Finch, CV2, PRISM international, The Ex-Puritan, Metatron, The Malahat Review, Washington Square Review, and The Harvard Advocate. This is his first full-length collection of poems.
Graeme Bezanson, Ultra Blue
