Blue Footprints

by Ann Humphries

~Moody Blues, Joni Mitchell, Marvin Gaye

Out west for weeks, my walkabout, I call him

from phone booths, his deep-rooted voice grounds me.

He spied me across the alley tending my tomatoes

in crop-top and shorts. I knew he was looking,

pretending to wash his car. He and childhood friends

back in school post-Vietnam, older men.

At nineteen, I sublease my first apartment,

dingy basement, blue footprints on ceilings, prior party prank.

His two roommates marry mine. I dodge, demur,

too soon for me. We part, earn degrees, change addresses.

He calls to say his father died. I drive to him, walk in his door,

hold his hand at the baseball game. With his come back to me,

his eyes weigh a future, I’ll ask once more, but no more

which sends me cartwheeling in surreal blue skies where

planes hang mid-air, bees freeze, and whitewater stiffens

like meringue. At the horizon, clouds of debris and dust

marquee my history—a woman striving—the frenzy,

endurance, spinning off balance, my woman’s feigned subtlety

as the first,

the first,

the first, bearing aloneness in a man’s barred world.

With or without him? Suddenly, I had to marry him, had to,

still do forty-five years later. As he sleeps, I whisper, Live forever.