Rothko

I.

I would like to tell you a story, he said.
He was sitting in his studio, you know how he was,
getting past middle age and fat, his eyes behind
those glasses growing more and more myopic.
It's about a little girl, he said,
and it has nothing to do with why you're here,
nothing to do with art I mean. It's just a story.

Emotion without image, at worst
the wonder of sitting in an empty room.

So he went on, and I was losing interest.
Half the time, you know, he didn't make sense,
like those dark paintings he did before
he died. You stare at them for hours and where
does it get you? This thing about the little girl,
it was just something about seeing her each day
on his way home, how she was always skipping rope.


II.

One rectangle is blue, another red, another yellow.
No, this sounds too simple. You can't do this
and call it a lie.

So I said, tell me what it means, and I meant
the painting he was working on, but he said
it means I hated her. He turned
and didn't say another word. Beginning to paint,
he worked the color in hard as if he were trying
to press it through the canvas.

Suicide. Approaching, its slow form
marks him like the rhyming of a poem, a color.
Shading saves the day, like love and forgiveness.


III.

The dark purple at the top is both the lid
of the grave and the spirit as it rises. Below,
the red is both the grave and the body
of the man who lies in it. Sunk into the ground,
into the burnt orange which is life,
the earth takes from the sun this empty grave.
Yes, my friend, in the field above it
which we do not see, a girl is skipping rope.
The grass is high and August turns it golden brown.
We have to imagine this.

The artist knows it is not the same for everyone.
Above the field he sees the mirror image
of the grave, a lake. The day is drifting into evening
and he can hear the girl's father calling her to dinner.
There is not enough time, enough space to get above this loneliness.

In the story, the girl is on a streetcorner.
The critic goes home sick
at the loss of his hero. Sentiment, he says,
where does it get you? The girl skips.
The world burns over. Burnt orange.

From The Iron City, copyright University of Illinois Press, 2000.