Under the yonder, I searched for my name in a blue
book. The pages were doors without knobs or keyholes, yet,

because blue comforts the eyes, the tome opened up to me.
Suddenly I had a taste for blue; it depicted the impossible.

For both Greeks & Romans there was no blue in the rainbow,
but here, by sunlight, the most audacious sapphire. And so

I forsook the allure of verdigris, cochineal, & mulberry
& walked to the river where, having polluted the water, the dyers

waited for it to clear. Rather than tinctures, a miraculous
draft of fishes came up with their buckets. But this was

not the end, nor the beginning, of my faraway look away.

-L.S. Klatt, Blackbird

Tagged: blackbird lit journal, blue, cochineal, color, contemporary poetry, fishing, mulberry, poem, poetry, shades of blue, verdigris