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Working: Volume 2, Number 1 - Issue 5 Spring 2023

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.

Copyright © 2023 Empyrean Literary Magazine, L.L.C.
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