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.

ROTHKO'S YELLOW

What I don't understand is the beauty.
The last attempts of the rain, my shoulders
aching from all afternoon with the ladders
and the hour with her. I watch the rainbow
until I have to focus so hard I seem
to create it. Thinking of her watching
this storm, wanting him. This lightning.
This glut in the gutters. Now only
the yellow left. Now the blue
seeped out. The purple gone. The red
gone. People downstairs playing Bach,
the quiet attenuated Bach. She must
have tried and tried. The holes drilled in.
The small man in the movie who looked
like laughter would kill him. The carnation
farmer who left snared birds for the woman
he loved. Who would hang himself after
stitching her ribbon to his chest.
What I don't understand is the beauty.
I remember the theatre in Berkeley where
we sat eating cucumbers, watching the colossal
faces played over with colossal loss.
I would get off early and meet her outside,
her hair always wet. All last night
I listened to the students walk by until 3,
only the drunk left, the rebuffed and
suddenly coupled. What did I almost
write down on the pad by my bed
that someone lowered me into my sleep? One morning
when she and I still lived together,
the pad said only, cotton. Cotton.
Sometimes it's horrible, the things said
outright. But nothing explains the beauty,
not weeping and shivering on that stone bench,
not kneeling by the basement drain.
Not remembering otherwise, that scarf she wore,
the early snow, her opening the door
in the bathing light. She must have tried
and tried. What I don't understand is the beauty.

--Dean Young from Beloved Infidel

Greatest Hits Gallery--Rachel A.

A summer experience in Houston gave Rachel A. the subject(s) of her poems. In the same day, she visited the Rothko Chapel and the nearby Byzantine Fresco Chapel/Museum. The contrasts and connections between the two museums give her poems a wonderful energy. In the first poem, she asks a key question about our response to art. What is it that keeps us from touching the works, the brush strokes so inviting?

at the Rothko Chapel

No velvet roping
restrains us from the brush-strokes.
So why don't we touch?

Many-sided room,
gray sunlight filtering down—
and very quiet.

Diamond-cut faiths
jostle here, come to embrace
a universal.

The walls—paintings—all
fade eventually to black.
Blue-gray at their tops,

or purple (Magist-
erial yet bishop-less),
but below, soft dark.

Nothing for the mind
but itself given itself,
a changeless turning.

The eye finds no rest;
roving sleepiness perhaps—
yes, suspension, but...

(Outside, the Broken
Obelisk remembers, mute:
Christs, big “C”-ed and small.)

In the second poem, a series of five smaller parts, Rachel considers the paradox of a sacred space deconstructed and imported from Cyprus, then turned into a museum, a "relic-box."




in the Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum

1
This space is built to be a relic-box:
the fragments of a chapel sleeping here
in a perpetual twilight of gray sun,
benches of silk stone laid for worshipers.
Here, I could sit forever, hour on hour,
but twenty minutes from now it will close.
This chapel, after all, is a museum.

2
Oh God, where have you been for all these days?
You linger just beyond my whirring brain.
A thousand conversations never cease,
but those are spoken with myself, not you.
And if at last I lose myself in sleep,
your hands don't come to heal me even there.
Only your mother's face, half-turned away.

3
This summer's been all iconography.
I know what the lean, stern, bronze faces mean;
the strange angular hands; the color scheme.
Hodegetria—“she who shows the way”—
I love, but as a scholar loves a book.
I've never painted anything, and I
have never prayed except with words and words.

4
In Cyprus, once, the bandits cut Christ down
and packed his body secretly in crates,
and raped his mother while she stood at prayers.
The plaster wounds of both are bandaged now,
and they may calmly rule and intercede.
But only during listed viewing hours.
And no one dares to kiss the face of God.

5
The janitor—a kind black gentleman—
quietly sweeps the floor. I wonder how
these ancient frescoes touch his inner life.
“Don't y'all step on the altar now,” he says.
“This museum is a chapel, after all.”