Angels
1.
The color fields shimmer
in yellows and blues.
Rothko’s ghost lingers nearby,
wearing his snappy, green
editor’s eye-shades,
studiously red-penciling
every word that a painting is not worth.
He labors in Limbo because
he took his own life,
even though he did not believe
in an afterlife, or in Limbo,
or in laboring endlessly
for redemption.

2.
The color fields waver
in primary hues.
You can see the suspended
movement in great stationed,
feathered rectangles, electrified by,
shivering with, transcendence.
Van Gogh believed in it.
So did Chagall: Angels,
on the order of Rilke’s
terrifying beings from
a realm of suffering higher
than our own. They hear
our cries as shimmering rectangles
of color. Pick a hue, any hue.
Any hue will do.