In Their Own Words
Graeme Bezanson on “Ultra Blue”
from Ultra Blue
If the eye is small
And light dim
If with December the ragged
Horses graze
If in the morning’s blue
Stained teeth
If the grass is
Dun and brittle
If the hilltops are like
Skinned knees again
If what you see
You can’t see clearly
If it was the shadow of
A black-mouthed kite
If what you are
Is with you now but
So is everything else
*
Let the dead wolf speak
Backing out of the night
As the bull’s horns rise
Let the moon shine through
The last translucent gods
No hard beds
For worn-out bodies
Slow volcanoes
On the horizon
These were not the first
Of our misfortunes
So the strangeness
Was filtered from them
Combing burrs
From a boy’s hair
Your name an arrow made
Fast to a tangled
Gust of wind
*
Inside the sky is a horse’s
Head her gashed cheek
Teeming with jewels and filigree
A plague of glittering flies
Sick disciples
Hot tears
Remove us
From our places
But never bring us
To another
Let this eye
Be a bronze wall
Against which you may
Exhaust yourself
Once there was a black foal
In the sky too
Beneath his mother
His outlines lost in mist
All night you could hear him
Chase the fleeing stars
From Ultra Blue (House of Anansi Press, 2026). Reprinted with permission.
On “Ultra Blue”
In France, I lived with my young family halfway up a grassy hill in a rural corner of the Corrèze department. On clear days you could see the extinct volcanoes of Auvergne in the distance to the east of us. Our closest neighbor used his part of the hill to graze big heavy-footed Percherons; the descendents of war horses, to me they seemed wild and unkempt and almost elemental.
These are the opening sections from my first book, which is now called Ultra Blue instead of Monster Energy/Ultra Blue for reasons beyond my control related to corporate brand integrity. While working on this book I was thinking a lot about different narratives of masculinity and “becoming a man,” both in classic literature and online spaces. One of the weird intersections of these two streams is the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling, which often turns up in youtube videos on channels with names like “RedFrost Motivation” and “Upgrade Your Mindset.” There are versions where the poem is read by Michael Caine over stock footage of men staring out at the ocean or hoisting heavy barbells or doing slow-motion parkour. Probably my favorite rendition of the poem is by a young Dennis Hopper on the Johnny Cash Show in 1970. “If” is the middle word in “life,” Dennis tells Johnny before he sidles over to a spotlight to perform his party piece. (Kipling turns up again later in these sections, with a line from Mowgli’s wolf pack regarding their doomed leader.)
Another spectre haunting these sections is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who dropped his babies off at an orphanage and went home to write probably the most influential book on how to properly raise sons, Emile, or On Education. I became a little obsessed with this book, it’s such a fascinating combination of practical advice and bizarre delusion. “No hard beds / For worn-out bodies” and “Remove us / From our places / But never bring us / To another” are a couple Rousseau-isms I can pick out here. I go back to Rousseau’s ideas throughout the book, kind of trying them on for size. I guess most of the book is a long winter of trying on ideas, thinking about how to raise my children, clicking around the online “manosphere,” doing irreparable damage to my content-recommendation algorithm.
In the springtime when the neighbor’s horses foal they do it in the same corner near the edge of the woods where one of my kids learned about electric fences. If the foals are female they are enlisted in the foal-making, kept in the field to grow alongside the other females, gradually lightening in color from nearly black to dapple-grey. If the foals are male they’re quickly taken away. Tractors have replaced Percherons for most things these days, but you can’t eat tractors.
