Rothko/ On Fear by Ollie Cowley

 Rothko wanted to paint basic human emotion. 
So he painted red over red over red. Behind the colour 
he was looking for light. In 1942 he painted 
The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, where Iphigenia 

is not a girl, but a black pine already 
resined in grief. Above her the amnesia of light, 
an umber sky, shadows spilling white,
the only motion the white hands of the wind.
 
The story of Iphigenia was never about the girl, 
but the men who called for the blood of a girl
knowing that the winds would one day change. 
The forest charred, the air stilled, deranged, and 

the truth beneath it all is fear, was always
fear, the open grave, the charcoal line, the dead 
growing out of the living like lichen, the pine 
a blood-eyed child, the pyres loose stones
 
and living rooms. Dress it up in the white hands 
of the wind. Call it need. Call it necessity.
Rothko wanted to paint basic human emotion
so looked behind the light and found blood 

rushing to no end and no knowledge of end.

Ollie Cowley is a Swiss-English poet, based in Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in the Telegraph, CHUCK, the Oxonian Review and are forthcoming in the Yale Review. She is currently a doctoral student at Harvard, where she looks at the idea of witness in long-form poetry.

30 December 2024