Today I feel the limits of trying to complete a poem in a day. Sometimes what you get is a draft of something, the shape of an idea. My wanderings took me to U.S. government warnings about radiation dangers in Japan and then to its information about treatments for exposure, one of which is Prussian blue, the dye first produced in the early 1700s. From there, it wasn't much of a leap to Hokusai and a cycle of blue and white, cesium and cyanide. I could say that it's quite coincidental that I'm reading Maggie Nelson's "Bluets," which you can hear a bit of here. But that's a lot of incidental blue. This, though, is a quite different shade. No Wittgenstein for one thing—just Hokusai....
Prussian blue
Hokusai drapes the roots of his famous wave in white, blown cliffs laced with fractals over foaming Prussian blue. Perspective renders the distant blue of Fuji even fainter, a peak of snow and tucked below, a slender stroke of this imported ink. It blinks from a tsunami trough, surprising as the shade itself, whose beetle shells and ash were meant to form a deep red Florentine lake. For Hokusai’s wild sea, white solids—iron salts and acids, cyanide (from cyan, “blue”)—become an alchemist’s surprise, a blue remove from lapis and its lambent, powdered stone. Blue churned from white remains a signature of the tint, the way its still depths yet suggest the movement just beneath, ships braced for breaking, points of stars pressed to the dark, poised for rubbing through. This evening snow burns into standing pools penned by lost villages’ debris, streets the shade of blueprints, and placid Hokusai nights. Not far from here control rods melt for lack of flood, some alternate path of atoms about to free another wave’s punishing white. There’s no penning what the wind will take, but Hokusai, we’re eating Prussian blue, piles of it to carry cesium and thallium away. Hokusai, we fill ourselves with the stain of almost-night till our mouths and teeth are blue. Against this wave, our fragile bones glow pale.
Image by lady in the radiator, J Loves Film, via Flickr. It had the right blue.
