Your Blues Become Me. A poem by Olga Stein

Your Blues Become Me
The room that is ours is shades of watercolor blue.
There’s light and air, but no angels.
In our suburban sanctum, 
when the blues come as murmurs,
we work on forgiving ourselves.
At times, the walls turn turbid, somber,
Muffling thought and speech.
The past seeps in like newly-spilled ink, 
staining everything.
Then the room grows dense with memories.
We lie side by side, holding hands,
waiting for the grace of dawn, its palliating light.

Some days evoke nights at sea. 
A doleful, heaving darkness 
seizes our room, the street, the city’s north end.
Our murky chamber
undoes tender gestures and glances,
and all the hurt you cling to
is weight enough to drown us both.
We bide the storm, watch for shifts in tone,
buoy ourselves on words, 
promises of clear, crisp skies,
sightings of a luminous horizon. 
We wait for the washed-out blues.

Some days, our room is light lapis
with curtains that fall like lashes, 
where windows gaze on sand and sea.
Outside, white melds to green then ultramarine, 
And an expanse of fluttering lights 
stretches toward a gold band of sky and sea.
I see us back in Naples, on days like these,
walking along the speckled beach.
You laugh again, urge me to look
when spotting a pair of bottlenose dolphins 
surface between the pillars of the long pier. 

On days like these, the world is a vista of hula-ing lights. 
And your blues are like the surf
stroking the shore, exhaling softly.
These are my favourite blues — deep, poetic.
These are your brilliant blues — royal, lofty.
But rest assured, I see beauty in all your blues.

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Olga Stein holds a PhD in English, and is a university and college instructor. She has taught writing, communications, modern and contemporary Canadian and American literature. Her research focuses on the sociology of literary prizes. A manuscript of her book, The Scotiabank Giller Prize: How Canadian is now with Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Stein is working on her next book, tentatively titled, Wordly Fiction: Literary Transnationalism in Canada. Before embarking on a PhD, Stein served as the chief editor of the literary review magazine, Books in Canada, and from 2001 to 2008 managed the amazon.com-Books in Canada First Novel Award (now administered by Walrus magazine). Stein herself contributed some 150 reviews, 60 editorials, and numerous author interviews to Books in Canada (the online version is available at http://www.booksincanada.com). A literary editor and academic, Stein has relationships with writers and scholars from diverse communities across Canada, as well as in the US. Stein is interested in World Literature, and authors who address the concerns that are now central to this literary category: the plight of migrants, exiles, and the displaced, and the ‘unbelonging’ of Indigenous peoples and immigrants. More specifically, Stein is interested in literary dissidents, and the voices of dissent, those who challenge the current political, social, and economic status quo. Stein is the editor of the memoir, Playing Under The Gun: An Athlete’s Tale of Survival in 1970s Chile by Hernán E. Humaña.