A List of Everything I Know That Is Blue

The sky in the afternoon.

My brother's Air Force dress blues.

Blueberries picked a few summers ago
navy and bitterblue that left stains
on my fingers.

Cornflower fields
in my grandfather's farm,
some vague family connection
to the earth of Alabama and the deep blue

of the Gulf,
shrimp boats that sail across the water
and the saving grace of being Cajun in the midst
of the tourists and relief efforts and
the blue-scale fish we caught that summer
in the pond behind our house.

The residual haunt
of my father's clothes in the laundry
long after he's gone out to sea
and the solitary emotion of one
long day after the another, the quiet cold
of a winter morning
when it seems like the sun will never rise.

The rush of the river's in Maine
I visited when I was young,
the peaks of the mountains
visibles from the interstate, the way it all
seems to create the tugging,
empty feeling of being smaller
than everything around you.