Closing in Blues

The local symbolism of crimson
With passion, anger, blood, and heat, but blue
With air, water, melancholy, and cool,

Is exactly inverted traveling
Through the cosmos of visible wavelengths
Of background electromagnetism,

Where what’s retreating or retreated from
Shifts redder, cooler, while what’s coming up
Grows more intensely and heatedly blue.

The whole sky in an all-sky redshift map
Comes across as one rainbowed yin and yang,
Indigo swirling into blue below,

A green interval and then the yellows
And oranges turning into echoes
As the red lobe curves from above to match.

We—you, Earth, the sun, the home galaxy—
Are hurtling in the direction of blue
Along with our galactic Local Group

Against primordial radiation,
Six hundred kilometers per second.
There. That’s six hundred more kilometers

Bluer in one direction than you were
A heartbeat ago. And there. Warmer yet?
Where’s this going? What’s the rush? Why so blue?