Unquestionably Blue

We use such simple words to weave
  the tapestry of light
into our language. Red. Yellow.
  Green. Blue. Black. White.
 
But what is blue? Did Homer know
  when sailing on a wine-dark sea?
Why did he paint the sky with bronze
  and layer green with honey?
 
The ancient brain is not the new;
  when, with modern eyes, I view
the ocean and the midday sky
  they look, unquestionably, blue.
 
With other simple words, we paint
  the colors that we feel.
Sadness, joy, fear, hate,
  love: all these signs reveal
 
some inner state. But what is love?
  How can we call that one emotion
longing, ecstasy, respect,
  infatuation, and devotion?
 
I grasp with these imperfect pigments,
  try to catch the palette of
experience — and fail. What tint
  can be, unquestionably, love?
 
My blue is not a simple sine,
  nor is my love Euclidean:
no matter how I flatten it,
  my love’s oblique meridian
 
will not lie on a paper map,
  nor nanometers ever be
Pacific waves, a robin’s egg,
  or what a person meant to me.
 
Just as the different shades of blue
  have secondary colors there,
so love can be tinged green with lust
  or dyed in indigo despair
 
and still be love. Love’s many things,
  and though its boundaries aren’t defined
its subtle thread is intricately
  laced throughout the tender mind,
 
intertwining feelings that,
  at first, might seem quite different
within a tapestry of sense
  that weaves around love’s referent.
 
In that tapestry, love cries
  while flying on blue swallow’s wings;
it flowers pink in fruiting trees
  and runs with umber wild things.
 
You’re in it, too, in faded fields
  of tangled thread, a knotted part
(the untrained work of younger hands)
  whose weft still binds my heart.
 
Our love may not have been for years,
  been made, at best, imperfectly,
even at our hyperbolic
  orbits’ heated perigee,
 
and cast us both on fast and far
  trajectories to where we are:
you, caught in the gravity
  of some bright northern star,
 
and me to where I settled, bound
  with two firm feet on loving ground.
But, sometimes — when I look on high —
  I see your color in the sky.