The Brooklyn Rail

Untitled (Black on Grey): Acrylic on canvas: Mark Rothko: 1970

Silence is so accurate,
Rothko wrote.

What’s implied
by an empty field

is the pale
mare grazing

a tree of dead
wind. The arrow

inside you lines up
and waits.

Untitled Elegy

Someone raining like the sound of aspens
before first light. Someone’s voice
like the eyes of aspens darkening
despite what tries to lift or climb.
Someone who knows the way it can take
all night until the meaning of night is no more
than the reasons for loving the night inside
the night. Someone who sees their father sitting
at the edge of a stone bed, silent as
first light, his mother’s arms around him
like the meaning of aspens in rain.
That whatever it is, however it comes, someone
who has the words will clear the aspens
past first light, speaking like leaves going
this way or that, without meaning or the names
of meaning, fastening, unfastening,
each hardly a word before falling into world,
like those who sleep to dream of sleeping
without end, that rain, that rain, that rain

Swan Lake

Summer lived inside of us, first as heat, then later
as curtains in wind. No future, nothing to do
with the years that made us, but to swim
into the late afternoon and read each other’s
horoscopes until our noses bled from the sun.
All day, I watched glistening couples lounging
by the lake house, their beauty a deeper bitterness
than the almonds they ate from each other’s hands.
It was Blanchot who wrote, “Man dies, that is nothing.
But man is, starting from his death.” The moon hovered
beneath the horizon, unknown to our loneliness.
Poppers or another peach? An endless ocean
or a perfect lake? I used to think that love would
be waiting, endlessly waiting. Like beavers crouched
among dried crocuses, their mouths held open
for rain. But how wrong I was to think of rain at all—
an idea which falls and falls but never lands.
And all this time I have been rowing towards
a distant white flower. To pluck it would be to live,
though this has happened many times
and only once. Like a white shirt floating
downstream, or bare legs returning nakedness to the river.
A warm wind settling into one tree, then the next.