—a meditation on Mark Rothko’s No. 8 (1952)

The light over the sea in the last minutes
before dark, when the sun has passed the horizon,
is transplendent, the line not a line but a curve
between above and below: two kinds

of burning. It is good to be a window
of forgetting. Though love opened you like good fruit,
it has passed, leaving the way it came—
by necessity, mystery: the consuming gift.