1. I was already in love with blue before I met her 2. la vide 3. the blue of oceanic silk wisps, a silver bound edge of turquoise, pearling, proliferating 4. the horizon 5. Antwerp blues that need the punctuation of old silver and crystal 6. Venetian blues that want gold and pink plaster 7. soft-surfaced Nabis blues, smeared with gold 8. the Italian blues of frescoes with strangely-angled angels 9. all the blues of 16mm film of the ocean, the nitrate rush, the slow dissolve, the slicked celluloid glaze 10. nocturnes of blue and silver, shears of green and falling fireworks 11. the nacreous blue at the back of an eye, how could I forget that? and other eyes 12. winter blue, just-born eyes staring back into mine 13. eyes of sadist blue flame 14. beloved eyes, the slippery blue-grey of where sky and horizon meet somewhere in the North Sea 15. the blue of an eye as it follows moonlight, when the full moon rises, the blue intensifies 16. eyes which should be full of powdery-blue steel but instead are full of the black orchids of internal trouble 17. cerulean blue as a keyhole view 18. blue as moonlight halo, as starlight in a grid, as inland sea, as satin 19. as a spring sky, the colour of the blue screen of death 20. some claim Paris is the city of blue, but 21. it’s a city of other colours set against blue, where blue is the structure of your vision 22. a celestial promise of artificial light in the blue hour 23. a spectacular rent of cerise, silver punctuation, gold veering rose, against blue 24. it’s a line of stone, a precise beige bourgeoise, against ceiling papered after Yves Klein 25. it’s the glaucous of trouble on a cloudy November afternoon in an hotel room in the cinquième, and 26. it’s the sky opened like a secret in a mouth 27. it’s the shot silk of a lilacked bruise 28. it’s light flickering between Hague blue walls and pale skin and white linen 29. it’s a wardrobe inspired by cyanotypes, I can only transmit in cyanotype tonight 30. the trouble with blue is that you need all of them 31. indecency blue, luring blue 32. blue as expectation and thirst 33. indistinctness blue, you’ll take it, and I’ll take you, I really will 34. the blue of a swoon 35. like a peace offering after rain 36. the blue of veins and their surprising constituents 37. the blue lightning while we fucked in the orangerie, and left my knickers for tourists on the lawn 38. the burn of a blue flame, the blue of fury 39. the oscillatory iridescence of a dragonfly, or a blue-arsed fly 40. the blue of a sky making promises it can’t keep, it’s not in the nature of skies to keep promises 41. and there are nights where blue is forbidden, tell me of those 42. blue as a disappearance at sea, the blue after-image 43. leached blue flooded with the deep dark, and the blur 44. my favourite blue, where blue turns to green or green turns to blue, somewhere on a peacock’s neck 45. the electric blue of a tulle meringue or an ambulance or a resuscitation 46. the blue that cradles true lovers, or is the backdrop for the Queen of Night 47. Walpurgis blue 48. the blue of forgetting-you-not 49. the blue velvet that lined a shoe 50. the blue hours, the midnight hour, the moments before dawn when the sky imperceptibly lightens and blue glazes the trees, cosmos blue, where the edges of the world sharpen 51. Rebecca’s blues: the blue of distance, blue in the depths and the edges; Maggie’s blues, the bluets; Lise’s blues, the most blue skies, the blue of looking back at earth from space, the blue unmentionable films, the blue stockings, the cyanide blue of Laura Palmer’s lips, cyanometers and the uses we put them to 52. say all you want, it was the sky, it is a glass bowl for dreaming.
By Isabella Streffen