You could not say Kevin Kiermaier’s eyes looked like the remembered
Blue of your older sister’s nail polish remover,
Towed from shelves, dutifully regretted, litigated — the fumes
Of which smelled of camphor and surgery and sent a cancer
Galloping through the limbic system.
Though they did look like that.
You could not say Kevin Kiermaier’s eyes, astray between seafoam and indigo,
Looked like the linen yachting pants
Of the man who fired the man
Who fired your father back when
Men like your father didn’t get fired.
Though they did look like that.
You perhaps could say it was the blue
Of all those habitual things — a lover’s eyes; robin’s eggs;
Or the irises of a lover’s eyes sculpted out by potter’s hands
and replaced with robin’s eggs;
Or the waters of the Maldives, where blinded lovers
Swam with robin’s-egg eyes.
A borderless blue, punctured only by sidelong glimpses of
Lashes and eyeblack and advanced defensive metrics in the middle distance.
The blue washes, yes; replenishes, surely;
Reliably drowns you down in its oneness.
In that way, it is the order you read of.
Yet you could not describe the one blue,
The first blue — Kevin Kiermaier blue —
That taught all other blues how to behave and scatter,
Other than to say it was the blue of
No longer believing but still praying.