A draft from yesterday in St. Louis

Anaphoric Confession, after  Mark Rothko’s, Red, Orange, Orange on Red

Baby, Monet rhymes with cliché but nothing, 
 nearly nothing sounds like Rothko—
  blood or light, believed to be silent 
   pound in the temples. 

I lied to you when I said I had been in the Rothko chapel.

I have not been surrounded by abstraction, by beauty.

I have not known Fra Angelico, or Signorelli, or Orvieto.

In Venice, for two days, I only loved the gelato.
We posed on the bridges for ourselves.

I live in the saturated, sentimental blood
 of my own loud head—hard
  amens and blunted blows.

Monet and his light. Degas and his dancers
 have no real home here—nor the Germans expressing
  themselves in the other room.

You have heard me cursing you when I should have stood silent.
You have heard my language resound in empty temples of  bone.

Here I would like to bleed across the room—light, color—like Klee—I pray,
 or come into you without a word, 
  like this Rothko—repeated, blessed, 
   parallel, and unrhymed.