By Shannon Spies

No one tells you the blue will assault you,

or that, devoid of motion, the lake

is not a lake, but some dead thing, empirically

beautiful, killed by all that blue.

So when you reach the viewing station

after hours in the car, wedged between

your sisters, who are strangers,

and your father, whose wife has made him

strange to you, you nearly tip headlong

into the water, nearly jump.

In that moment, you must have looked as sublime

as any teenage boy could look, poised

on the edge of his life, windless,

looking down a thousand feet into

a breathless hue. When we pulled you

back from the rail, you must have blushed.

Or, compelled by love, you must have been ashamed.

Even now, I see its mark in you.

Your eyes have withered in their depth

and drawn snow in.

Their blue is halted at the blue of ice. Those savage peaks

thrust up a thousand feet into your eyes.

When you returned from prison, you must have wondered

why I never wrote to you.

I had the paper but couldn’t move the pen. For months

I thought Should I send a book?

But look: there are no pines or mountains. Only blue.

That which is clear is that which draws us in.

At thirty-three, brother, you cannot hope to change.

You are the oldest living thing on Earth.

Shannon Spies earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Idaho, where she developed her taste for rhapsodic prosody and the mysteries of the extra-logical. Her poetry has been featured in Poet Lore and Kestrel and is upcoming in Broad River Review. She lives in Pittsburgh, where she serves as a Director on the Swissvale Farmer’s Market Board, and is the proud owner of four hens (Kitty, Ginger, Iggy and Bowie) who wandered into her yard in the summer of 2020.