An Industry of Yearning by Robert Levy

Poetry
36 pages
8.5" x 5.5" single signature with hand sewn binding
Published 2012

Rothko, "Violet, Green and Red"

Mornings, as I settle to work, it towers above me, a wordless adv
for vacations from the real: three quadrilaterals stacked upon
each other, faintly ominous and remonstrative.

I contemplate Rothko’s vastnesses. He got it right, I think, the furtive lapse

of one color into another, all that hulking purple brutality
pressuring a swath of dark green and buoyed by a vermillion sea.

Rothko’s sheer gigantism makes me sleepy, or rather, ambitious

in a way I am not. I would rather lash the page with fantastic hues

than with tired, required verbiage. I would prefer,
in fact, to become violet, green and red, create something that did not refer

to anything in the world except the unending, insurmountable well
of colors that heave up from the mind in a relentless tidal swell

containing every human product there ever was or ever will be,
as though all of creation were being hawked simultaneously.