The Blue Remembers Nothing of Who Entered First

Two skeins go into one vat at dusk, my wrist pressing both under together — when I lift them at dawn, tell me, which one did the color love first?

The dye keeps no ledger the way my neighbor above the Archive Steps keeps his, numbering every hand that reached a thing before another reached it first.

Indigo asks only: are you fiber, are you thirsty, will you hold me — never whose thirst arrived, at the lip of the vat, a breath ahead of the other’s first.

They tell me the river that took a waterman and his wife in one falling hour has been made, this week, to answer a question water was never built to answer first.

So the law invented an elder and a younger, the way a weaver invents a selvage where the cloth, left to itself, would simply end, with no thread declared the first.

I have dipped two skeins a thousand evenings and never once needed the vat to tell me which wrist went under before the other — the blue does not care who finished first.

Let the Temple keep one candle for two bodies carried up together, unapportioned, since even oil, older than any Register, has never asked a corpse to go first.

I will not say which measure of indigo I gave away, or which I keep for my own hidden blue — Zara, some colors refuse the ledger entirely, and are not required to answer who loved them first.