Love is to thirst as water is to sore throat

So much in this house is blue. I never liked the color

but have married someone who speaks sky and carried

an ocean inside her once, and wishes to carry another

owing to her thirst to nurture. Now my winter shoes

are blue, most my shirts, the curtains, a denim jacket

I never wear, my water bottle, irises on the lattice, sticky

notes declaring love on my desk. Blue comes from bleu

of the Old French, meaning pale, meaning colorless.

So far in the journey now, blue of the throat chakra

governing how we speak our truth, of the sea that offers us

the corals dangling from her ears. As a child I wished

my eyes were blue so they could be used in hospitals

to soothe the sick. Blue of the median between the heart

and third eye, youth and wisdom, of the depth water needs

for its magic to work. Can you believe that the ocean is only seventy

percent water and us sixty, both influenced by the ventriloquism

of the moon, waves and currents, that we are almost oceans?

Bruises blue when they no longer threaten to vinegarize

into wound. Love dazzles the logic hemisphere of our brains,

clouding the water in our bones. Alone, I could never live

amid such color. Yet here is this water, this sky, this frequency

of seven hundred and fifty terahertz, planting shadows

in the Sistine Chapel, in my house. After two blue decades

of my hands lost in other bodies, yours finger-dancing

on rosaries chanting the name of the blue lord, we are here at last,

and nothing not to love now, this life, this luck, this thirst.