ROTHKO'S REMEMBRANCE

By the annals of history
inspiring and inquiring of us
how we love your innovation
with an open palm of your belief
in ecstasy of your expression
and stone bas relief
cast in a lucid abstract tone
of your oeuvre's confrontations
as a free practitioner of motifs
in a transcendent juxtaposition
to invent with replenishment
for my enthusiastic generation,
which connected our reality
in a spiritual recognition
at your cathedral in Houston
when we in our grief
at your passing
of legendary significance
from my young affection
in Rothko's remembrance
doubling down at the Metropolitan
and standing in long lines
by open doors at the Big Apple
for hours waiting on a weekend
to view your miracle of drawings,
you ignited the face of abstraction
staying with me in a cool class
of students attempting
to honor your Sixties soul
on this Beat's opening
his hazel poetic eyes
to enlarge experimental ways
from those wise frontiers
in a critical open ended
daily space gazing back
at surreal conferences
when we took to the podium
to lecture on your absorbed part
of calligraphic inventiveness
when your temperamental opacity
and gracious inheritance
introduced a new chapter
of our cities' canvas
in all these still life years since
not assuaging our distance
of unrelieved guilt and reprisal
to foreshadow the drama
your personal wounds
as you labored
to unravel a panorama
of puzzled expressionism
you bequeathed to your fans
to an an awed grateful generation
so near and yet so far apart
in a narrative's second thoughts
that we cannot forget a hero.