TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith and this is The Slowdown. 

Once, someone walked into my house and said, “Well, someone’s not afraid of color!” She’s right. My house is full of bright, bold colors. Every wall is covered with art, or lined with bookcases, or both. In the living room alone, there’s a turquoise chair and ottoman, a pale pink chest of drawers, and a yellow sectional sofa. 

Yellow is one of my favorite colors. My dining room cabinets are a shiny, lemony lacquer.  After my divorce, when my house was sparsely furnished, I invited my family over for a new furniture assembly party. When we opened the boxes for those cabinets, my dad said, “Oh no—they sent the wrong ones!” I laughed and told him, no, they were exactly the right ones.

Green is another color I’m especially drawn to. It feels like the color of possibility. After all, when someone is new at something, we say they’re “green”—green like a tiny shoot making its way out of the soil in springtime. I find the color both calming and energizing at once.

But what about blue? It’s the color of the ocean, of the sky, of some of what we find most beautiful and serene. On the other hand, when we’re sad, we say we’re blue. We have the blues. We might listen to—or sing—the blues.

Today’s poem speaks to how we all see the world—and our lives—with completely unique eyes. With a vision colored by our own experiences. 

Blue
by Jodie Hollander

At the Denver Art Museum

This picture of the past I have is blue.
It’s deep and sharp, it’s not a common blue—
and though I hate to look at it, I look
and look, I cannot help myself—
I look until I’m inconsolable.
Yet I wonder, is this picture true,
or perhaps it’s a little bit distorted;
how to ever really know for sure?
Once a friend told me it was green;
I closed my eyes but couldn’t see the green.
Then a shrink suggested it was red,
and I flew into a rage: how could it be red,
or any other color for that matter?
So how to live within a blue picture?
I’ve changed the frame, I’ve painted over it,
but the original always shows through.
Lakes are blue, as is the ocean ahead; 
what if I dive in and immerse myself
in the blue waves, in the cold blue current,
and let myself be dragged all the way down,
down to where the blue turns into black—
if I survive do I get a brand new picture? 
If I could emerge like this picture here:
see how the sharp blue begins to recede?
But what happens to the small blue voice inside,
the blue badge I’ve earned from suffering?
Once I dreamt the picture went up in flames,
and burned the old house I grew up in.
I stood there and watched; I didn’t do a thing,
as everything was consumed in orange and black;
for a moment I was certain I had died—
but then something emerged from the ashes, 
rather like this lovely picture here:
a soft, almost inaudible fluttering
of a blue butterfly escaping into the light.

“Blue” by Jodie Hollander from NOCTURNE © 2023 Jodie Hollander. Used by permission of Liverpool University Press.