rest your eyes not on what is holy
but what is blue. blue as truth—
the sky, above us, morning deepening,
a blue-bell's domes, blue jazz,
Coca-Cola bottle caps pressed into
cement while the mix was still wet,
and now remain there forever.

a warm afternoon in August, a dim-
lit room in a block huddled away in
Mountbatten, the humidity beading
our skin in sweat. after our tryst,
I watched the blue towel hanging
from your neighbor's bamboo pole across
the window flutter in the wind alone.

you slept, so it was my secret—your
body slumped above mine, breathing
blue into me. back then, we didn't
have a name for what we did. I didn't
dare ask for labels, have the words
reach into our skin and ink us forever,
when it already ran in our veins.

I remember that blue, undulating
in the wind, and the blues following.
every bit of blue is precocious, Stein says:
blue is the only colour to take up
huge swathes of space in nature, but
offers little consumables in return—
not even blueberries are blue.

for a while I tried to conjure up
orange, blue's spectral opposite,
but could not. the eye imprints
what it captures most vividly; perhaps
the same can be said of the heart.
I am a collector of blue things,
given away to the colour of truth.