Deep Silence
(for Mark Rothko)
by Jeffrey Little

Mark Rothko, Photograph by James Scott, Somerset, England, 1959

I.

Life begins with a single breath and an overwhelming sense
of dislocation. Doom, and so on. The unrelenting here-ness
of the heavy Hand. The one’s who’ve always worked closest
to the gut apprehend this, you, apprehend this, your fallback

defense is a tired smile, a smile that runs through your eyes,
that offers through the eyes a basic truth about the hammer. 
That it’s a hammer that’s forever about to fall. As a bulwark, 
it would have to do. There will never be enough. The brink

as ideal distraction, a long con of serf against slave. And for
what? Crumbs. Coming down from a shaft in the clouds up
above, whatever will keep you theirs, in their city, bad magic
that has us turned the wrong way. You hate this fucking rain.  

II.

What’s at stake here is that there is a world to gain. An inference 
from this statement: that there is a world that’s already been lost.  
Or worlds. To classify is to entomb. Locate the transcendent form.  

The math is problematic. It’s critical to understand this to proceed.

III.

Memory is of a color. This is the baseline. And it rises so
slowly that when we look up and it’s everywhere there’s
little a person can do except sigh and say yes. Saturation  
is a strategy to seek beyond the given. Take a step closer. 
The walls are defeated. Each painting is like a held breath.

IV.

He awoke to a surfacing 
in a slow swirl
of sea. Strange 
aspects of vestigial 
ability, moving, 
                 sections 
of the note sounded  
as the expression 
of an eddy that spun
its round way to chapel.

V.

The relationships are estranged. Distances amid the color fields. What it’s 
like to live in the gap, the electricity that’s between the shapes generating
a frisson that is the transition, a neither-world without a code or construct. 

A salient ghost expressed as the synapse modifies the mystery of division.

We start anew without the weight of preconceived constrictions and take
a breath simply because it is ours, because there is no one who can teach
you how to breathe, or run when the voice inside screams run. It isn’t our
place to trouble the dead. What’s being created must be a temple of veils.  

VI.

I have painted Greek temples all my life, without knowing it.
An entrance, as if in opening, with oils and a skillful layering 
of light, there are porticos and winding arcades under glass, 
atria, and an entablature running with what seem like trees.

Or a village in Mesoamerica. Garlanded with radiant fibers 
and vanilla vines woven into bands of color on a backstrap 
loom. A shtetl in the Pale of Settlement. The blue laughter 
of running children and the terrible silence of all the adults.  

What is there to touch, let alone to hold onto? Wreckage.
And what dust was it that built this bomb? Sifting through  
the rubble, the leavings of a locus, what choice except build
something back? Paint is but the spirit.  I have made a place.

VII.

Returning to the city to the mirror returning there without 
monsters or gods returning without sales or silence to run
cover for our bodies buried bodies off and under the seas

across the seas where those homicidal pricks and bastards 
lived those pricks who won’t stay dead in carrying in songs
through time the language carrying my god that language 

it’s like I never shed any skin like I never shed Rothkowitz 
or grew into anything more than myself like I hadn’t seen
the yellow become more than yellow and fill my pictures

with its light a light that was closer to a chant or a prayer
running right to left without vowels or anything that could
tie it to anything but the essence of the sacred in its space

VIII.

At the halfway house of an emergent method understood as such
only after the fact, when the theories of the refined protocol take   
shape and go out and clear some space. Not everything strange or 
unfamiliar is transcendental. There is reaching and then retraction, 

the necessary stumbling toward a clearer issue that seems to come
into focus just as it slides further away. It’s an unknown adventure
in an unknown space. He feels a satisfaction as the huge canvases 
continue the process of emptying away. The shapes are larger, yet 

fewer in number. It’s moving toward a form like music, an organic 
alignment that shifts and moves and above all else it envelops, rich
in the possibility of the indefinite, spectral, beyond any attachment,
of nothing like the world, but what soon would be a world in itself.

IX.

The slow burn and the aurora emitted in these layers of paint.
It’s the both/and residing inside of the synthesis of incongruity.
I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their 

surface. Others stare gobsmacked into the mouth of an astral
wall. The problem with living in this world is to keep from being

smothered, else weeping in the contemplation of the certainty
of something other. It’s all in there. Both/and. Balance means
melting the vicissitudes away, but the dark is always at the top.

X.

Reduced to its essentials: what we do is we move toward silence.  
Mine is a bitter old age walking a broken line that travels but one
way out. It takes its time, is all. “We must not say so.” The irony
of deep silence is of ending this (other) silence and solitude, as if

ending meant more to something else somehow and not these
shell games of assumed souls.  Listen, we must execute gestures 
without shame. Turn each system of expectation on its ear. You
will be true to whoever you are, on that day, and that day alone.

Tomorrow is yet another faceless slab and everything else can go
to hell. I don’t express myself in my paintings, I express my not-self.  
I am an anti-expressionist.  “A foot is to kick with.”  Little time still
remains.  He stands up. Moving, moving toward, moving toward 

silence with the tenacity of a climber trying to reach the top, but
down the mountain wasn’t part of the plan. He has chosen here.  
Elsewhere would be inconceivable. Decisions. Plot points upon
a canvas. The quiet is as deep as it is long. Silence is so accurate.

---

NOTES: Italicized, bold text are words attributed to Mark Rothko.

Text in quotation marks are the words of (these) others:
1) John Berryman (X.)
2) Charles Olson (X.)

---

Jeffrey Little: “Delaware is a strange place. Thirty miles wide. A population of, what, sixteen people? Still, it’s full of stories. Sad but apocryphal tales of Edgar Allan Poe roaming the streets of Newark. Or, a mythical Godzilla of a turtle that lives in the bubbling waters of Lums Pond. The sad tale of vibraphonist Lem Winchester. The sad tale of trumpeter Clifford Brown. At least I got to read poetry accompanied by the alto saxophonist Harry Spencer, who played on Sun Ra’s masterpiece, The Magic City. That wasn’t sad. That was a pretty great day. But Harry’s gone now, as well. And Harry the Barber, too. But our kids were both born in Wilmington. That was really great. All in all, we’ve had a good run here. It’s taken a while, but I’ve come to consider this place home, and my poems, well, I guess they’re Delaware poems. Books include The Hotel Sterno, The Book of Arcana, Five and Dime, as well as a number of Mudlarks. I am also supposed to mention that I am a 2001 recipient of an Established Poetry Grant from this strange State of Delaware, this state of sixteen people that is all of thirty miles wide.”

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