Turquoise

by Ken Haas

When a poet friend asked if you left a scarf
I could part with, said she would wear it
on our walk to drought-worn Abbots Lagoon,
I brought her your tasseled merino,

sharing, with one still making words,
a cloth last worn only weeks before
by one whose stories had all been told.
November light sprayed the scarf’s blue

across a reverent shoreline,
and memory took on the affection of living,
in the company of a color
pressed palms turn unseen, the color

a Dark Ages Frenchman coined Turk-oise,
as if a lady in Constantinople whose eyes
would guide him home. This color clung
to the lucent wing of a beetle on its back,

peeked from the lining of my coat, spangled
a heron’s beak, graced the buzz cut
of a blithe girl jogging past, kissed the hem
of the water, where water used to be.