Blue Velvet

Today I am doing something different. For one thing, I’m not going to translate. I’ve got my own poem and I’m going to try and figure out what it means. It’s partly inspired by the old sixties song:

Ours, a love I held tightly

Feeling the rapture grow

Like a flame burning brightly

But when she left gone was the glow of

Blue velvet (Woah-woah)

But in my heart there'll always be (Woah-woah-woah)

Precious and warm a memory

Through the years

And I still can see blue velvet through my tears

Pretend the refrain isn’t there. I left it in just to remind you of Bobby Vinton and this song that never goes away, always comes to mind with the overly sentimental woah-woah. My memories of the tune are different than might be expected, though, and have always been borrowed. By that, I mean I never actually recalled a person in a blue velvet dress, but as a girl I listened over and over to the sad, crooning voice of a singer whose name supposedly wasn’t Vinton but rather something Polish.

Back then I would dream about what the velvet would feel like next to my young skin. A blue feeling of gentle, of soft, of next-ness. A flow of warm nights trickling across a shadowy landscape. Nights and candles because of the glow. Yet I never lit the candles. They weren’t mine. Why didn’t I light them? Why not? Wasn’t I worth the warmth? (Somehow I must have known, even then, that the velvet wasn’t meant for me, would never be mine, which meant I was destined to always be watching, as simply a vicarious eye or I that would never do anything but try to snatch up the afterglow caught by the corner of my eye as the garment passed before me, oblivious to my observation and pain.)

I didn’t want to live with that pain, but the song never would allow me that freedom, and every time it resurfaced from the indigo depths of my memory its presence deepened. The blue would envelope me and I became a crumpled human form with a celestial skin made entirely of sadness. It was a sadness that didn’t even belong to me, that had merely seeped into me like certain songs did. Vulnerable. So many words then were taken off and returned to me on ebb tides, moon-shaped rivers, the falling of rhythmic rain. They came and went while I listened.

I don’t think I ever realized back then that I was a water child, born of seas, lakes, and rain. I never saw myself as drowning in my own small life, sinking into my own selfish center of gravity. No, years ago I knew nothing of this, yet the song persisted, permeating and preserving a nostalgia for what had never been lived. A love never known, a garment never worn. This doesn’t mean the sands were not shifting and the light did not flicker, because ebbing and flowing often work in infinitely slow ways, molding the beach to their ways. I was the beach. The fabric - my mournful blue and melodious velvet - gradually became a tattered land of bones whose movement slowed over time and under the weight of memory. This never stopped me from swaying to a song I rarely heard, its beginning anchored to the rock of expectant youth, its nocturnal threads fading into azure shadows.

At that point, when the shadows had all but dissipated, something else happened, but I cannot say when or where or why. All I know is that I noticed I was no longer wrapped in the gentle evening of a dress worn by an eternal stranger. The evening had ceased to glow and I realized that I was having trouble distinguishing where the hem ended and where it had fused with something new, something not lost in unrequited, unnecessary nostalgia. A shift. I went from the dress to another source of blue. I began to wear it.

As I began to live through, not for, the blue velvet gown, I also acquired a song that was my own, not one taken from the voice of a singer with an altered name. It wasn’t what I’d expected and it was so gradual. I wore the echo and the color of the song. I was the song. My transformation in no way resembled the tortured metamorphosis of a Gregor Samsa and was more like having managed to come to reside in a place that was larger and had no need of my physical limitations. It’s all a bit hazy, but when I finally looked around, I saw that I had become the ocean and the night, everything that was holding the world in place.

I am a new geography now, speaking, moving, splashing over rocks, peering at distant illumination, floating easily and knowing things I had never dreamed of back in the sixties. Back when I was a girl impossibly in love with a song. Back in the beginning there had only been a dress, worn by a nameless and heartless woman. The dress was loved, perhaps more than the woman in the song had been, by one whose heart had been subsequently cloaked in loss. I am none of that now. Years have passed like water, years have become water and maybe a velvety sky. The blue no longer captures the eye like antique cobalt glassware. It has faded, and that is fortunate.

My memories of a non-existent blue gown on an unknown woman have now transformed into memories of me listening to the melody of loss, which includes my own loss of adolescence, at the same time creating an awareness of what the color was capable of doing, why the glow hurt so much. What I’m saying, I think, is that the song was a transfusion of sadness and color, but that now I am that song. Or a poem that is a different shade of blue.

This is everything I want to say about the soft dress that left something empty in the singer and in me, the lister. It’s something you need to know in order to understand this poem I’ve written, around six decades later, and with the same tides that rise and ebb. Except that where the blue velvet was everything before it disappeared, my skin has grown to meet the universe. It is all I ever want to wear, the only song I want to sing.

Blue skin

Land runs along these two arms

like water craving

the dry deltas of wrists and coves

shaped like

fingers of cobblestone

It moves on, forming Alpine knees

beside oceans and

splashing

past two silent thighs

This skin has to be blue

like water trying to

inch in the direction

of a dripping shore

If this body of water

walks into a room

or over a brook

it won't fade

it won't dissolve

it is only a fusion of

arms shoulders legs knees ankles

that no longer sense

their proper latitude

meaning that they are

easing slowly

a n i n c h a t a t i m e

toward a liquid forever