Blue Innervation

Four years old, I trembled to lift the lace
of gauze that shielded his lazy eyes.

I thought he might want see the sky, or the leaf-strewn
ground, freed from these twin piles of sterile snow upon
his darkly stubbled face. Freed from that which only
dries a loss, but takes no pain away.

My mother, far more wise than I, would gently motion
to surpress my eager hands, with the joy of forlorn
comfort deftly impressed upon her smile.
It has been a while since I've seen that somber joy in anyone.
Like sun-pierced sheens of rain, ablaze in solar lights
it stares through closely falling stars.

I saw it in my father when a child of his was born,
in my Grandmother, when she played an old blue tune
to children that would come to understand,
a departing friend, knowing that, though memory remain,
we should be separate not by distance, but complacency,
in a certain conductor's face, when we told him of the night.

Each of these, an instance of illuminated sorrow,
a bold portrayal of the beauty of experience,
may I never know the how or why of anything involving human action,
that I may see in clarity, as these beings have,
that I may see just one such sorrow,
not through myriadic fragments,
but amplified by joy, through prismic refraction.