THE COLOR OF MEMORY:
RETURN TO THE ROTHKO ROOM

On a raw, gray on gray day,
   then colder on coldest,
rain splattering like water
   flashed from a fan,
I return to the Rothko room
   at the Phillips Gallery,
Cozy as a womb,
   familiar as a five-foot hill
I tumbled down as a child:
   Mt. Everest of my imagination.
The difference was scale,
   it always is...

The paintings converge
   as Fuji does in haze,
Smaller than my first sightings,
   hushed communion with form
A river flow of colors
   on canvasses still vast and grand...
A room dazzled with inner light
   of ochre yellows, blending to reds,
Darker ambers to blue greens,
   become tangerine, now maroons...

It remains an essential room.

AT A BANDING STATION

Birds do not possess, as humans do, a face to register helpless terror.        —Thomas Savage

Probing like a phrenologist
the firm crown of a warbler,
a process begins by blowing
on its skull,
ossified flesh bone
secret as skin
under a nun’s habit...
no larger than a bare pea
out of a pod.
Here transients from their world
of air are marked by sex, age,
fat content, and branded forever
by a supple silver band:
Freedom is a knothole
after a final weighing in;
their final examination over.
I watch them flit through space,
a graying crown, a weather-worn wing,
black and white eyebrow stripes...
a vireo’s more than bloodshot eyes
under the dim station lights,
whose glare never let me off the hook,
holding its unrecorded, tremulous breath.

—for Frank Jestrab (CC ‘88), a noted birdwatcher