To Mark Rothko from the Chapel

Kathryn Jones

January 22, 2023

I enter your octagon again this morning.  

Sit on a bench. Float among the planes. 

Meditate in this holy space without religion, 

without crosses, only fourteen black paintings

in this small, silent, windowless place. 

Time hangs by gossamer threads of thought. 

You designed it so nothing distracts the mind,

no artificial boundaries, no bright museum glare,

only a muted glow from the skylight and floating

rectangles of black – perfect absorbers of light, 

color of night, ancient caves, charcoal, burnt bones,

sealed tombs, underworld, holes in the universe. 

Everything here invites contemplation – of life, death, 

eternity, whether there is an eternity. I feel sorrow 

in the black spaces. I feel comfort in their existence. 

You created all of this for us, then left it, left us, 

left the obelisk purposely unfinished, broken. 

You spoke of truth, freedom, justice. Such anarchy.

Vandals saw only darkness in your work, splashed

white paint by the entrance, left handbills that read 

“It’s okay to be white.” They did not understand that

white is the sum of all colors of light. I pray for them 

and the world in this sanctuary of sacred beauty. 

In the stillness you created, I rise to meet you.

Kathryn Jones is a journalist, essayist, author, and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the anthologies A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas. Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.