The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Dressing the Bear by Susan L. Leary

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We’ll Take the Riddle, So Long as It Remains Unanswered

Sometimes  the   blue  is  so blue it is every shade of  blue  at  once.  The
first  sound,  the back  &  forth  of the blue  water.  A  pair of  scissors  is
blue as  is the  hem  of the blue hand that holds them. The  first urge, to
snip the blue heron from  a swath of nocturnal  shoreline. Discernment
risks  injury,  so  we sleep  inside the  blueish  swirls of  our own blueish
bodies,  mistake  the brute  flap  of a wing  for  touch,  suffering  for  the
brief amnesia  of stars. Distant  or beloved, a man’s cigar smoke is blue,
a vast graffiti of legs stretched into the blue of a borrowed beach chaise,
the  marooned  bones  fooled  into a  comfortable  shipwreck, the  lungs
into ether  or sea.  A  ghost  can  whet  the  blade  &  sit  inside  the  blue
of a palm  without  our  knowing. What  comes  is the  world before  it’d
begun, before the blue was anything other than blue.

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