At the Rothko Chapel, and: Picasso's Eyes, and: Lovesick

Abstract

At the Rothko Chapel, and: Picasso's Eyes, and: Lovesick Alice Friman (bio) At the Rothko Chapel What is the portrait of Nothingbut the night sky without a star.An abstraction real as a hit on the heador a hunk of bread bitten off hungrywith the back teeth. But if Nothing means absence,that's another story. Then the portraitmust hint at what beat there, the last thrumbefore dying, the last shadow of the lastrope frayed out. Fourteen black paintingsin a surround with no escape. Fourteenportraits of the face of Nothing orof an absence so unbearable, Nothingsaw fit to pour in. One can't help but want a spitof yellow or a Pollock drip of redto latch on to, to say, this being a chapel,something must eulogize the life's colorsof what mattered. [End Page 48] Outside the entrance, a displayof holy books—your choice to borrow,take in with you. An amulet to ward offthe emptiness by holding on to a bookwhich denies it. Rothko knew what he was doing.Sit here and look. Here where the benchesare hard, the floor stone, blocks of stonetrailing footsteps of fading echounlike the colors you strain to see but can't,being bled out—that Wednesday, rightacross both arms. What he said art is:The simple expression of a complex thought.Simple, straight as a razor. Picasso's Eyes No matter the period or style—rose, blue,Les Demoiselles d'Avignon's geometricsoldierettes in love's cubist army that knockedthe socks off critics, or those gargantuan womenlight as balloons cradling their boulder babies— always those eyes. In all that metamorphosisof mask and circus, in the canvas of bulls,bombs and screaming horses, splayed kneesand collapse that demands a lifetime of looking—that one constant. It is as if Paris and New York [End Page 49] and all the hoopla never mattered, and allthe currency he ever really needed was home,duplicated, dark and heavy lidded, there beingone pair of eyes in this world, and he who couldpaint anything, push imagination anywhere, couldn't go beyond them. And why, except to saythey must have been first eyes, the shadowin the corner of the room eyes—primal patternand mirrored stamp—the way tree branchesand leaf veins repeat in the dog's ear and on the inside of your wrist. Never mind body partsforced into trapezoids, necks stretched to stalks,or the lewd itch of bulls in the drawings we knowto be himself, testicle heavy, hairy and rank with seed.All his eyes, even those of lovers, share the same sad gateway to this world—oculus doloroso—overflowing the curved bank of the lower lid.They say, on the night he died, April 8th of hisninety-second year, he raised a glass to his guests,and right before he fell, Drink to me, he said, Drink to me. And I want to think the last he sawwere those eyes. Drink to me only with thine eyes,and I will pledge with mine. And he did, didn't he?Leaving us gifts brought back from the cliff edgeof beauty, kisses in the cup, just as the song says. [End Page 50] Lovesick Buchenwald means beech wood,Birkenau, copse of birches. How they cherished their trees,those nature lovers. The blind roots twisting down, deepas history, the graceful arms reaching up, and all the birdsdisappearing into them like smoke. Alice Friman Alice Friman's new collection, Vinculum, is available from Louisiana State University Press. Her last two books are The Book of the Rotten Daughter and Zoo, winner of the Ezra Pound Prize for Poetry from Truman State University. Her work appears in the Southern Review, Shenandoah, Gettysburg Review, and Best American Poetry 2009. She is the poet-in-residence at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia. Copyright © 2011 University of Nebraska Press