Ballad of the Blue Cafe

The waitress behind the counter

is folding napkins into herons

and the menu

has been rinsed in sealight so many times

it echoes a choreography of ocean.

*

Let us eat sky, you say, as an old man

orders the Blue Plate Special

and his wife drapes an aquamarine

shawl over a chair.

*

I want to breathe in imagination

unlocked from ice, I whisper

and the cook nods

when I fill my lap with feathers.

*

But have you forgotten how glass

skitters across swept floors?

How bolts of horizon unravel?

How so many lives drown in loss?

*

I’m thinking about cyan intentions

and untranslatable gestures.

I’m thinking about the question

always in your eyes.

*

On the other side of heat

summer dragonflies shimmer.

Evening spills across the parking lot

and the universe

opens its indigo fan.

*

An earlier version of this poem originally appeared in Foliate Oak. I recently revised this in response to a color prompt on Self-Crafted. Can you guess I’m obsessed with blue? In fact, if you want to see blue at its best, watch Krystof Kieslowski’s Bleu (or the whole trilogy, Red, White and Blue). Also, the subtitle is a riff on Henri Matisse’s quote: “A certain blue enters your soul.”