Orange and Yellow, by Caley O’Dwyer

Untitled (Orange and Yellow), by Mark Rothko (USA, b. Latvia) 1956

​Orange and Yellow
 
California,
I am just about to give into you.
It is true what you said about me,
that I am able to fly, that I can 
will myself above the earth. 
Sometimes I can remember. 
 
Although I am still at odds
with palm trees, drum circles,
sandy, charcoal-colored air, 
I cannot outman 
your crushing waves 
of time, the light you give. 
 
You held me in your palms 
when my mother died
then came to life again.
1985, her hulking green  
Mercedes Benz upside down, 
broken nose, purple skin, 
her voice the next morning saying,
“Son, don’t come in, do not come in.”
 
I am in you the way a river 
is in its bed, wandering to the sea. 
On and on the river teams
and turns below the skies,
rushing between the trees.
 
You speak in bridges and distant seas, 
conifer, bees that lift me to my tongue. 
So much I want to be the sky, 
present and full, unreachable, 
making clouds the shapes 
of saltwater coves, the oval 
remainders of tidal pools. 
 
I reach high above the ground. 
From Mount Shasta to Blythe 
and San Iynes, the Golden Gates
above Merced, up to Vega and Deneb.
In the darkness the archer is enemy
or friend. You are more than twice
what I comprehend, but I 
feel you breathing in my skin.
 
I hear my mother’s laughter, 
and feel my father’s 
lovely, grumbling hands.
Their voices are like rooms.
Love is hard to say 
correctly, but it is true: 
Up and up I go
into the yellow heat, the cool 
black night, its popping stars,
its bracing wind, and then, 
and then the stillness where things begin.

Caley O’Dwyer

This poem is from the author's recently completed manuscript of ekphrastic  poems, Light, Earth, and Blue: Poems After the Paintings of Mark Rothko.

Caley O’Dwyer is a poet, painter, psychotherapist, and teacher living in Los Angeles. His poems appear in American Poetry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Ekphrasis, and numerous other venues, including the Tate Modern Museum in London (as part of the 2008 Mark Rothko Retrospective). He is a three-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and a recipient of a Helene Wurlitzer grant for poetry. His first poetry collection, Full Nova, was published by Orchises Press (2001).