the question we need to keep asking

i'm the red garage out back of our first house on 59th street, the white trellises where my mother's roses clung like knots of everything beautiful.

i'm the yellow of a wiffle ball bat,sky blue sneakers racing on fresh,

black asphalt, little moons of porch lights reflecting against a tarnished copper key.

i'm the color of the muddy white boats floating sleepily atop the mountainous green bath of the long island sound that reaches from the northern side of the island toward the faint low lights of connecticut.

i'm the thistle weeds and green elephant grass whistling like time bending to fit seasons of spilling apples and snow.

i'm the stained glass window light celebrates through to find the polished beads on my wife’s wedding dress, my daughter's chestnut eyes, the skinned knees of my son as he cries.

i am many and the same river can't step in me twice. i'm the color of bible salt on a refugee's cheek as she crosses another border, the blood red of her bitten lip

as she looks into the dusty orange twilight for a place to sleep. i'm the black that cannot breathe and the blue absorbing azaleas.

i'm the color of heat and may we never get too old for car sex, the gunmetal darkness of another cold night dreaming of fiji.

i'm the color of a hurricane stirring beneath the flapping wings of a butterfly hovering above some honeysuckle in australia.

i'm kidney beans and spinach leaves drizzled in tangy balsamic, the feathers on the sparrow with a quarter of an orange in its beak, the exit wound a rainbow leaves in a prism,

every stretched inch of skin tent slung inside the unlikely blue of the chlorinated swimming pool where my toes touch the slippery bottom of love not being an answer but the question we need to keep asking.