Blue Vase
Because you like to sleep with curtains drawn,
at dawn I rose and pulled the velvet tight.
You stirred, then set your hand back on my hip,
the bed a ship in sleep’s doubled plunging
wave on wave, until as though a lighthouse
beam had crossed the room: the vase between
the windows suddenly ablaze, a spirit,
seized, inside its amethyst blue gaze.
What’s that? you said. A slip of light, untamed,
had turned the vase into a crystal ball,
whose blue eye looked back at us, amazed, two
sleepers startled in each other’s arms,
while day lapped at night’s extinguished edge,
adrift between the past and future tense,
a blue moon for an instant caught in its chipped
sapphire—love enduring, give or take.
Copyright © 2016 by Cynthia Zarin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 13, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem is an actual transcription of an event, which is a bit unusual for me: a blue vase set between two windows refracted the morning light. And then, Hart Crane’s poem ‘Repose of Rivers,’ which I have always loved, in which the wind is ‘flaking sapphire,’ surfaced in the last lines; an example of the poem itself catching reflected light, as the vase did.”
—Cynthia Zarin
Cynthia Zarin
Cynthia Zarin was born in New York City and educated at Harvard and Columbia. She is the author of five previous collections of poems, including Next Day (Knopf, 2024); Orbit (Knopf, 2017); and The Ada Poems (Knopf, 2010). She is also the author of a novel, Inverno (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), two books of essays, Two Cities (David Zwirner Books, 2020) and An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History (Knopf, 2013), and several books for children.