THE HOME

Blue Sings a New Tune

By Marj Hahne

At first there is nothing, then there is a profound
nothingness, after that a blue profundity.

—Yves Klein

In music, silence is more important than sound.

—Miles Davis

A hundred years, it seems, and Blue had gotten as blue
as the moon and birds and blazes and notes and the wild

yonder allowed, had shaded navy, royal, robin’s egg, baby,
cornflower, cobalt, sapphire, cerulean, periwinkle, powder,

ocean, electric, indigo, azure, slate, steel, ultramarine,
Prussian, Persian, International Klein, midnight.

And manganese—the last time Blue sang a new tune,
same year Einstein flashed his happiest thought: a body falling

from the sky doesn’t feel gravity as gravity
curves space and time. Fast-forward

and a happy accident of chemicals swallowed
red and green waves and spit out a blue

never sung before and now, at last, Oregon Blue
oozes from squeezable tubes for anyone falling

in love with the bluest nature unextractable
from nature. Sixty-some years since Kind of

Blue, Miles Davis jazzing the blues in time
horizontal. And Blue falls back to the summer

when a girl and a boy, home from college, fall
asleep to Kind of Blue while his parents are away,

Kind of Blue, and she will fall into the silence
of love like that, the last time Blue knew love’s

the space where nothing is everything and everything
bursts into and out of itself, humming.

Marj Hahne is a freelance editor, writer, and teacher, and a 2015 MFA graduate from the Rainier Writing Workshop. Her poems have appeared in literary journals, anthologies, art exhibits, and dance performances. She reads poems to dogs and pairs poems with craft beers, spirits, and coffee for her YouTube channel.