Mark Rothko’s vast rectangles interpose
themselves. There’s this too: pink light hovering
over green, scored by pale scratchings
as if frayed by its own intensities of thought;
feathered edges like the back of a merganser’s head.
I saw one yesterday among the mallards
at the cemetery pond, sunlit. We stepped aside
when the funeral came through, waited
then went on: two red-tailed hawks in a tree,
a passerby pointed out. Whom they buried,
we didn’t see. Under every stone, someone.
I’m reading about Rothko, how he fled pogroms.
You’d think he’d be happy, being here,
but his colors darkened as he got old—
by 1969 all blacks and grays. There were bombs
then too, of course. Under every stone
a thesaurus of sorrows.
Ruth Hoberman is a writer living in Newtonville, Massachusetts. Since her 2015 retirement from Eastern Illinois University, she has published poems, essays, and reviews in various journals including (most recently) Constellations, South Florida Poetry Journal, SWWIM Every Day, Consequence, and Ploughshares.
