Cornflowers. Delphinium. Beauty spot on

a drake mallard. The color of Miró’s dreams.

My bedroom, which I made a nest for fantasy,

where I lay on azure sheets, naked as an plum,

as eager for shame as Old Testament stones.

Lapis lazuli. Tanzanite. Copper as it ages.

The eye of peacock feathers. Even the way

light slants across a raven’s wings as it holds

a funeral or feeds a prophet—a shimmering,

a vanishing, but still true as any commandment.

My front door, cyanotype prints on my walls.

The vein on the back of my lover’s left hand

when winter thins his skin. Shadows on snow.

A virgin when the angel comes upon her. I once

fell too far in love with someone with blue eyes

and went through dozens of paint swatches

looking for a match, sure that Sherwin-Williams

had a name for the shade that was also a feeling.

I stayed too long alone in that love and learned

a new blue. One of Greek seas, of a horseshoe

crab’s blood famous for its healing. The color

Pliny the Elder said was a summoning to orgy.

Ashes under a microscope—small galaxies in

shades of cobalt and indigo, the minerals in bones

refracting and bragging our elemental beginnings.

That stranger’s hair. The sky until sunset insists

on transformation. My immodest heart empurpled

with all these pleasures—Robins’ eggs. Neptune.

Ribbon eel. Damselfly. Your shirt on my floor

the invitation to an ecstasy deeper than any blue.