​In Blue Rooms: For My Mother, by Melissa Coffey

La Chambre Bleue, by Pablo Picasso (Spain) 1901

​In Blue Rooms: For My Mother
 
My grief paints the last days of you in Picasso’s muted tones of melancholy. Paints you in a gown the colour of consolations; hospital walls, shades of faded postcard oceans. Paints your aqua skin, paper-thin, bleached by morphine. Daubs the bruised greys for coma. But no matter how I mix the colours, none portray the leach of chemotherapy in your veins, the ruthless atrophy of cells. No colour for the tumour, lodged deep in your brain like an unsolvable riddle. I make a work of art of my mourning. I resist the title, imprinting itself in every moment of my blue period: Portrait of My Mother Dying.
 
Cancer rendered you into a still life. Yet your seascape eyes, your topaz ring cut from clear summer sky, sing brighter hues in my memory. I am Picasso, hiding another room inside this room of (in)terminal waiting, a place of solace. I sketch the vase of cornflowers, defiantly joyful like you, cooking to music in the kitchen, your hands a dance of spices and love over the pan. Splash recollection’s canvas in vivid cobalt for the coverlet to warm your weary body. Direct the sun from a window to drench you in seven intensities of light—one for every year your illness tainted.
 
From the ghost of your heart-shielding breast—brave absorber of unspoken sorrows, sacrificed years ago—I release a symphony of sapphire butterflies, winging your pain far away.

Soon, you too, will take flight, beyond the confines of these blue rooms, into an endless sky.
Grief mourns with one palette, love with another.
 
Melissa Coffey
  
This poem was first published at Medium.com.
 
Melissa Coffey (they/their) is an Australian writer and editor. A former theatre director, they’re fascinated by the wilds of nature and the human heart. Their work often explores loss, desire and sexuality, sometimes through a feminist lens. Melissa’s poetry and fiction are published in Aurora Journal, Exist Otherwise, Crow’s Quill Magazine, Last Girls Club, and The Ekphrastic Review. Forthcoming are works in Antithesis and two anthologies in 2024 (Improbable Press and The Ekphrastic Review). Melissa was once an artist’s model, where they fell in love with art. They’re working on several chapbook projects and a novella. Connect on Twitter @CuriousSeeds.