Black on Maroon
After Mark Rothko
1) Some leaves look like this, matt on tarmac. They glint where rain pools. All is camouflage. What else but a window, sill consumed by shadows. The black, liquorice-like. The light is sherbet. A car is maroon; organ walls, tissue … What’s left after the sky left its prophecy. The damask of the room on the wicker divide. Black on black, a single fishnet which isn’t mine. Black on black are the wigs, now no one’s at all. 2) Such colours, the shade of funeral balloons-- mauves, maroons. And light: the kind that enters through a snail’s broken shell. In this place the pronouns are incinerated, walls close in with incremental force. Like a party where all the guests have left, where through the blinds sleeplessness is reaching towards distant cars. How your scarf droops to an innocent smile-- how the planets promise to rise, though fall again. |
PATRICK WRIGHT
has a poetry collection, Full Sight Of Her, published by Eyewear Publishing (2020). He has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at the Open University. |