The Constant Shade of Blue



He couldn’t remember whether he had counted his steps that day,
crossing the threshold into the constant shade of blue…
or whether the weather had yet known him well enough to ignore him
as he let go

Whereas he had once tripped lightly across the sins of summer,
construing only as much as his lack of discretion might allow,
he now watched as anything and everything that had ever meant anything to him
floated in the air

And every scope of every distance ever measured lay disarmed
amid the relative obscurity of the desires by which it had been formulated,
each and every item of existence standing infinitely separate and distinct
from itself

“Let it go,” he told himself. “Let it go just far enough beyond your grasp to elude you,
even as you earnestly stretch to touch the farthest reaches of its other side,
for nothing is ever as real as we might want it to be
except for this

Too few lessons are ever learned in any event,
dream light skips across a river of ice,
leaving its shadows draped in crystalline blue
beyond its jagged edges

He turned back around, only to stare, face-forward, into his future,
contemplating, if for only an instant, his inability touch anything devoid of shape,
and then, at last, letting out a final long and lonely sigh
of contentment

Traces of his steps still rest there, where once a door opened to allow him through,
they wait for the wind that will come, in its own time, to gently lift them up and away,
knowing, all the while, that every particle that sculpts the endless sky
is no less meaningless.