Cerulean: Variations on Lines of Durrell

Abstract

Cerulean: Variations on Lines of Durrell Diana Lueptow (bio) Yearning takes a starboard tack inadequate to one’s vision of the past— swinging with easy hunger for land. Each island is a speech to memory.On charts they fall like lace;the time is morning, therefore soft. On charts they fall like lace. Sometimesany isle is Greek. Bulkhead to brace against.Warm breezes of muscle memory. Hugging shore, could leap ashore—women rest on blue wind,and like repairing mirrors holding up a window left open to the cold—kindnesses scouring rooms clean.On charts they fall like lace, the boat stands in to the island happiness is, you sing as if sailing to Delos— which was, Callimachus said, a poem in the sea. Mother, daughter watch for the curve; the swing of the next one, bay’s first white Victorians,lawns long to the water—repeats in her mind. [End Page 13] On the sacred island dying was prohibited. Last bluest walloping rim of water.Callimachus singles out with praise, that Delos lies like a poem in the sea, loved bycurrents, lapped with blue lines, numinous, birth isle.Longing storms the waves of sky that land moves under. And like repairing mirrors holding upsmall towns and trees—remote and clean as temples— to the lovely air, island floats on island, only memory after all. Rounding north northeast harbor town and lawns swing into view. [End Page 14] Diana Lueptow diana lueptow has always lived in the Great Lakes Midwest, where she has sailed Erie and rowed Cuyahoga. Author of Little Nest (Kent State University Press, 2015), in 2022 she received her second Individual Excellence award from the Ohio Arts Council. Quoted lines: from “Delos,” Lawrence Durrell, and “Hymn IV: to Delos,” Callimachus, trans. Stanley Lombardo and Diane Raynor. Copyright © 2023 Diana Lueptow