Rothko’s Earth and Green, 1955

Perhaps each color was inspired by a sensation

in his pores, cigarette smoke in his nostrils

or the pleasant rise of heat around his head.

Red sweat. Ashen door. Then his whole night

was that: canvas and haze, the sour hint of dinner

still on his breath. Already he had left the room

by painting a portal into the next, and this despite

his urge to stay in this world, to frame an impossible

gesture. It is said he could not remember

the faces of his country: reading near the warmth

of his father’s samovar, hide-and-seek in the crooked

alleys of Dvinsk, yet such an ordinary fear haunted

him in every green vibration and encroachment

of blue, every thin overlap the hue of rainwater,

every wall through which a trace of light might pass.

Sometimes a color was just the thrill of his skin

at the brink of discovery, like when a boy notices

figures in the grain of a kitchen table, or milk

swirling with tea while his mother irons laundry

just behind him. Corresponding signals of press

and steam, wisp and dispersal. And even while

painting he understood that somebody else must

open the space between them, that a viewer could

ease his passage by recognizing that his canvas

was a door to the common world, dawn between

then and now, so stare for a moment into the mouth

of this picture: inhalation exhalation, green

blue, the yawn of a man before he stirs awake.