by Emily Sorensen

by Amy Nemecek

How Much Blue?

Velvet jazz drifts across the lake from where an
ensemble plays at the pavilion, trumpet crooning, 
How much blue can summer hold?

Dad’s Ferguson tractor sits idle in the field, its
cadet-blue paint powdery from hours in the sun.
Dresses, towels, dungarees flap against cerulean sky,
blue on blue on blue to match the heron that fishes

in the neighbor’s pond. Chicory grows in periwinkle 
canyons along this country road. Skippers, sulphurs,
and brush-foots flit among bachelor’s button.
Jays scold from turquoise-dusted spruce boughs.

We drive to the blueberry patch and fill buckets.
I love rolling their tartness around on my tongue 
as I sit on the deck, a book of Mary Oliver’s poems 
open on my lap, its pages stained with dusk. 

An azure dragonfly alights on the railing, 
so close I could stroke its slender thorax. 
Barn swallows and martins wing to roosts. 
Procyon winks in twilight indigo.

More than enough.