Fractals on the tree, neons in the window,

us three striding down the nighttime sidewalk,

your clothing bright, your hand long on the air.

This is a home scene, oranges and reds.

Behind the brightness is the blue:

the blueberry blue, the sour black and gray,

the bitter reward, the process,

the cloak which twists and covers.

Your door into this blue,

the blue of your woven basket, your call,

your brother’s and your own.

The blue of the helmet and the buckle,

tracking the seam, binding the hand.

Yet another settles,

the color of quiet, the pause,

the crepuscule, the orchard at midnight,

the woolen sleeve. Ahead of the street lamps and the motion.

The place of icebergs,

the ridges slowly etched, your ancestors

sleeping resplendent for those sweet millennia.

Things grow smaller still, and I see the long view,

the great bow. The shift

between the atmosphere and space,

between where the skin of the egg meets the air,

it is this. It remains

after the engine has died,

after we gather up the leaves.

It is this blue, crossing the river and the sea,

the three of us on the sidewalk,

driving the boundary of forest edge and the creek side.

It is this blue, elliptical, stretching like a twilight desert.

Tracing, this blue, not the electrons that fly within us,

but the space through which they sail.