Inside the Blue Mosque, Istanbul

Say the word aloud, say blue,
and the mind teems with guests:
Renoir, Vermeer, Gainsborough’s Blue Boy,
Picasso’s Blue Period, the lines
from a Mark Doty crab poem:
a shocking Giotto blue.

Say blue, and a marlin taildances on the water,
a slide guitar spells heartache in plural.
Woke up this mornin’, I believe I’ll dust my broom.
Frida lives on in la Casa Azul.
And the beggar trapped in a hash dream
haze hails bands of blue men from the Sahara.

Say blue, and doors swing wide open.
To speak it here adds yet another
tile to the thousands already present.
Did Gershwin divine such a rhapsody?
Such a dazzling faience mosaic?
Or is blue encoded in our cells,

a script for the primal color of being?
Look around. When you left your shoes
at the door, didn’t you slough off
your skin so blue could breathe,
could curl phantom-like among the pillars,

a counterpoint
to the slow, steady rhythm
of a cobbler tapping out his blood
beat in the bazaar, circa 1650?
Blue. It haunts the back alleys,

a companion for the road, for the long haul,
for daughter and courtesan a final recumbent address.
First water, last silence, the country in between.
Blue Danube. Blue bayou. Cordon bleu.
The heron and the kingfisher. Blue.