Sonnet #137

Here are fourteen ways of seeing the color blue
First, the sky is blue and vast, the backdrop of imagination;
Second, the Caribbean sea is like the sky's distillation;
Third, the sky pushed into diamonds, lapis lazuli's hue;
Fourth, there's pretty eyes; Fifth there's the poisoned ones
Whose skin fills up with quicksilver's deadly shade;
The babies born blue, their slow beating heart's fade;
The dead that turn blue when the coldness comes;
The note of blue in the sad cafe, decadence and invention
But mostly decadence; the blue of the plates; the blue
that comes from depressiom; the blue of the intentions
of voters broken in cities; the blue line of order and truth;
The blue in the face of holding breath against truncheons;
Blue's the color of sky above streetlights, all blue, all blue.