Untitled Rothko

God made everything out of nothing. But the nothing shows through.
--Paul Valery

Blackness—like a pit grave in the middle of the canvas—swallows their failures, unburdens them of their victims.

Many years of image storms—each might have been a place to hide—and then his signature style of clarified silence—a loneliness washing over flat fields of sunlit or clouded color.

The painter crouches—brush dripping on his shoes—in front of a new world and lets it draw him in like a breath. In his ear, the voice of Fra Angelico whispers, The artist must be a thief and steal a place for himself on the rich man’s wall.

Jewel-toned bands of ruby and emerald like unrolled bolts of seamless cloth—threads vibrating over the abyss.

Old worlds of woe—in their blood-stained rags—decompose grain by grain, blown by the wind until mountains flatten.

If he could stand in the spaces between losses and still be himself, if he could find the windy dissonance between his world and theirs, if he could keep method from overwhelming beauty, they might not look for The Next Big Thing but become engulfed in the sea of their own tears.

They might hear Arbeit Macht Frei rising up from the darkness and find new life—use a razor to cut ribbons from a shroud.