homage to Wallace Stevens
is not blue but black. It is an angle of light
on the barbules’ captured pearls of air
gives that flash of Byzantine sapphire.
Likewise the etheric pour
of photons that runs the heart like a millwheel,
runs in the river of blood that is not
red, but black. These days we look through
the nothing that is not there
to the Everything that is. The moon,
say the physicists, manifests only
for the eye that would see it.
I don’t know if this is relevant,
but when my father shot the dove
on our first and only hunting trip
it lay on my palm in its last warmth,
opaline colors shifting to my pulse
then fading. What was in my face
at twelve, my crooning voice as the light
went out, changed him. We are still all
at sea, all in it together. Look at the moon then,
steer by the stars, believe it when I tell you
the Indigo bunting is not black, but blue.
