By Fan Ogilvie
Cans no gallons of paint fell from the sky in a marvel of rivers coating the forests the fields the winter fallow gardens all houses restaurants businesses
and the glass blowing barn with a clear watery surface very like ice but less crystalline more like a clear shellac that was when it began to snow slow at
first but speeding in tiny flakes blown with pace by the strong nor’eastern wind all that had been coated by the clear paint was now touched by the
fast covering snow and all that was clear in its shellac finish began to turn the softest blue of the eastern bluebird powder puff blue first the fields then
gardens forests as the snow coated the branches few oak leaves beech leaves all turned a darker blue like the sky before night houses
each one by one turned prussian blue and businesses and the glass blowing barn a blue almost black it was time it was that time of the year the
earth moved between the sun and the moon blocking all light of the moon a full moon on the solstice and the snow kept falling through this event and
when we looked up to see the first and last light of the moon the moon had turned phthalo blue too as if the snow was dancing on its surface
but what we figured we were seeing the moon through a prism of snow all blue what happened to its white we never knew that night
when everything the snow touched or screened turned blue and stayed that
way until the next morning when the snow and the shellac from above
melted fast away what we saw emptying into the brooks and streams on
that next day was runoff as cobalt blue as any sky we had ever seen.
Fan Ogilvie, who was West Tisbury’s second poet laureate, lists among her accomplishments a contest in poetry for high schoolers known as Promising Young Poets, a program in poetry and playwriting in the Martha’s Vineyard House of Correction, a continuing Summer Festival in Poetry featuring readings by national and local poets, and numerous readings at various venues around the Island.