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.
