Stardust and Blue Orchids

A whisp of a melody

forgotten until it’s found

like a penny lodged deep into my grandmother’s blue flowered couch

impossible blue flowers

it seemed like satin

smelled like smoke

So did she.

She fed me sugar wafers, 

crisp, fragile, like my memory of her.

“Oh sugar!” 

I was hers alone.

Her voice a smoky haze,

like the one in the painting that hung above her piano--

a moon escaping the clouds,

I remember it followed me as I walked, 

a secret only she and I knew.

There it is.

just out of reach

trailing off

“The smoke always goes to the fairest” she’d say, 

an exhale with a smile in her eyes, just for me.

She played by heart, her mood often blue, like those flowers.

Notes drifting, floating, 

exhaled.

Stardust, it seems now.

There was a fire.

Her heart stopped, they said, she never knew.

With a whisp of smoke she was gone.

I have her music, that’s all.

Her name in black ink, my only solid memory.

Do I dream of her?

Her face stays forever the same, unmoving,

younger than I remember,

a photo, surely.

without her smoky laugh it can’t be real.