Rothko, no. 116, 1969

Flecks of white, like floaters in an inverse
eye or stars in the blacker sky of another
world, mark an inconsolable landscape that
all but consoled a dying man: pale foreground
stretching like a desert to the horizontal
line of night, the far edge of dream, and
beyond it the black we see when we close

our eyes. And the thin frame of white paint?
It opens up the vision, insists on the border
between us and what we behold: another horizon,
a perspective that leads to the vanishing point.