She told me her eyes were made of cobalt.

“Not the color, but the glass, you know, like those old bottles filled with healing lotions and cure-alls.”

From her place in the grass, she points to blue bottles shelved inside her grandmother's kitchen window. When she reaches up I see her hand and forearm, the palm lighter than her bleached cotton blouse, her skin polished and smooth like the blank side of dime-store Christmas paper but cut with a wavy blue vein drawn lengthwise and crossed by a thick fold of skin on the inside of her wrist. She sees me looking, leans closer and puts her hands together in front of my eyes.

“They were supposed to be angel wings,” she says, “but they were too small.” She holds the hands up to sunlight. “See how they glow?”

The brown paper bag flattens the grass between where we sit opposite each other inside parallel whites and calico prints hung out to dry. The color is wrong again. I trade ocean blue for the turquoise pencil I found on a bus seat. I tried to draw her every time she came to sit with me, there between the rows of linens her grandmother pinned to the double rope that ran from the kitchen porch to a pole planted near the wood shed where raindogs bark hollow and raspy winter storm warnings from a brick basement stairwell. I never could get it right.

Even now breezes lift eyelet embroidery, flap bed sheet seams confused between the scent of starch and bluing, sun on ripe berries and umbels of dill, ochre pollen powder waves and the pungent lime of wet white milk paint on a picket fence. Straight black bangs cut across the chalk and platinum tint of her face that does not match the shape of these eyes or the virgin veil irises shot through their centers like stained glass pierced and indented by copper pellets. And I never mixed a shade that recaptured the timbre of her voice, her words—snow flakes falling through sunlight. She links her hands together, flutters the fingers in unison, shadows the grass with the insect she has held up and brought to life, yellow with sun and in its glow outlined like a mourning butterfly. Sometimes she talks about secret words her father made her repeat after him whenever he had too much to drink.

“I haven't seen him for a long time,” she says, “but I remember the smell of greasepaint on the kitchen towel he used to wipe his face when he came home late at night. And I remember some of his words. You can have one if you promise never to give it away.”

I nod to her.

“Taoyateduta,” she whispers. “Taoyateduta was the last word he said.”

A crow lands on the color clothesline, pecks at an old kitchen apron pocket. The wind picks up again. Shorter lengths of hair play at the edge of her collar held closed by a single pearl button. Now there is no traceable border to her chin or brow or shoulders. Thick tresses whip around from their place down her back, smear the sharp graphite pleats gathered at the waist of a jumper full enough to cover the heart shape of her legs crossed learning-style beneath a white cotton dress.

“I don't like this,” she says. “I'm afraid of the cold. Let's go inside before clouds pass over us. See how dust rises up into the air under the woodshed?”

Her grandfather pushes his saw through a width of dark board. He looks up. I hear the cutting sound catch and stop. His jaw widens to speak but his lips make a hollow shape. His hand drops into pine shavings beneath the sawhorse. The old grandfather falls to his knees, cradling his arm, still looking at me. I have no voice. I have only one word I can't tell anyone. She runs to the shed and picks up the hand.

“Sing,” she screams, her eyes violet petals, ”Sing that River Song. Gather Gather them all.”

I shake my head. No. Not violet. Not petals now, malachite.

“Sing that One Oh, Sing, Wet clay, Warm, Wings of Clay, Clay red, SiltSoft clay halos. Wash Him in the Blood of the Lamb”

She stands frozen, head back, the pearl ablaze at her throat, her dress pulled taut by wind. Water flows, deep red flows, trails from the hand into a monarch magenta ink imprint seeping through white pleated pinafore folds.

Jesus. I still can't get it right. Goddamn brushes pens razor cut lines, stillness too bright, watercolor words, the hymn of a pearl, prism eyes caught in a web, phthalo blue crackled on a glass palette.

Eliza Kelley teaches American Indian and Nature/Eco-Critical Writing at Binghamton University, where she is working to complete the Ph.D. in English. Work in Antietam Review, Anthology of New England Writers, Icarus International, Square Lake, Absinthe Literary Review, and forthcoming in an anthology by Purple Canary Press, Berkeley.

This piece was first published in INK POT #3 - 2004, a literary journal.

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