Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s "Rothko’s Last Meditation" is an elegiac and hallucinatory poem that reimagines the final days of Mark Rothko, the abstract expressionist painter whose work explored the interplay of color, emotion, and spirituality. The poem moves through surreal imagery, existential weight, and the dissolution of identity, mirroring both Rothko’s artistic obsessions and his tragic suicide in 1970. Hicok constructs a dreamlike space where personal despair merges with cosmic transformation, suggesting that Rothko’s final act was not just an ending but a movement into a different kind of existence.

The opening lines frame Rothko’s decline as a period of ascetic withdrawal: “In the days leading to the miracle he did not bathe or speak, ate / only bread and oranges and slept on the floor under a window / covered by a sheet of moonlight.” The word “miracle” here is paradoxical—while we know that Rothko’s end was self-inflicted, the poem frames it within the language of transcendence, as if his death was a passage rather than a failure. The diet of “bread and oranges” evokes monastic simplicity, recalling religious fasting, as if he were preparing for something beyond earthly experience. The “sheet of moonlight” draping his sleeping form transforms his surroundings into something ethereal, as if he is already half-removed from the physical world.

The next image shifts into the surreal: “Vines grew through the house. / On each leaf the face of a child appeared and aged / through adolescence and adulthood, finally death as the leaves curled / into small red fists.” The encroaching vines suggest nature reclaiming space, an organic force overtaking the artificial structure of a home, much like time overtaking the body. The leaves, each bearing the “face of a child” moving through its life cycle, suggest an accelerated vision of mortality. The final image of the leaves curling into “small red fists” carries particular weight—red, a dominant color in Rothko’s later work, especially in his Seagram Murals, evokes both intensity and suffering. The clenched fist, often a symbol of resistance or rage, here suggests life collapsing inward, an unconscious mirroring of Rothko’s own physical and emotional deterioration.

Hicok then introduces a strange, apocalyptic unraveling of reality: “The first to vanish were neighbors / and the man who sat on his stoop playing a drum with the obsession / of rain eating at land.” The world around Rothko is disintegrating, beginning with the ordinary—his neighbors, a street musician—who simply disappear. The drumming man, described with “the obsession / of rain eating at land”, suggests something relentless, an elemental force that erodes rather than creates. This rhythmic image—music reduced to destruction—parallels Rothko’s own unraveling.

The following lines intensify the surreal collapse of physical existence: “An hour after their bodies disappeared / their shadows followed, absorbed by the ground which sealed around them / like a mouth.” Here, even the residue of existence—the shadows—is erased, as if reality itself is consuming what remains. The simile “like a mouth” suggests both a burial and an act of devouring, as if the earth itself is hungry for silence. This sequence evokes a world not just dying but unmaking itself, dissolving layer by layer.

Then, the poem shifts into a more abstract, cosmic register: “And when their abandoned voices entered his body / and coalesced, collapsed the way starlight can fall back upon / and consume itself…” Rothko does not simply observe the vanishing of others; he absorbs them. Their voices merge inside him, forming something like a black hole—“starlight” that collapses inward, consuming its own radiance. This image recalls the intensity of Rothko’s later paintings, where darkness seems to absorb all surrounding color. The metaphor of starlight consuming itself also suggests an implosion, an inward-directed destruction that parallels both artistic obsession and personal despair.

The ultimate erasure comes next: “…when even he had vanished into that black / pearl of negation, thought and the ravelings of color ceased.” The phrase “black pearl of negation” is striking—pearls are formed through layers of nacre around an irritant, much like Rothko’s paintings, which layer color upon color to create depth and emotional weight. But this pearl is not luminous; it is black, an artifact of nothingness. The phrase “thought and the ravelings of color ceased” suggests that Rothko’s departure is not just physical—it is an erasure of perception itself. Ravelings of color implies the unspooling of creation, the undoing of artistic labor. The thing that defined Rothko—his ability to manipulate color—is now extinguished.

But then, in one of the poem’s most haunting moments, Rothko does not simply disappear: “He became a shape / floating above horizon, the world's luminous edge.” This suggests a kind of posthumous transfiguration, a merging with the light itself. The horizon, which appears so frequently in Rothko’s paintings, becomes the threshold where he now exists. The idea of the world's luminous edge reinforces this sense of transcendence, as if he has passed into the liminal space between presence and absence.

Yet, the final turn denies him peace: “and for a moment felt / nothing, a miraculous calm he’d soon lose and chase / into his chosen death.” This moment of nothing—of weightlessness, absence, release—might have been enough. The word “miraculous” recalls the opening, emphasizing that this state of non-being is, paradoxically, what Rothko sought. But it is fleeting. The phrase “he’d soon lose and chase” suggests that even in this threshold space, he is not at rest. Instead, he is compelled toward his chosen death, reinforcing that Rothko’s suicide was not an accident, not a failure of impulse, but an act with intent, pursued with the same relentless precision that defined his art.

Hicok’s "Rothko’s Last Meditation" is a powerful reimagining of the artist’s final days, blending historical fact with an impressionistic, almost mythical narrative. The poem mirrors Rothko’s artistic style—layering images, dissolving boundaries between material and immaterial, personal and cosmic. It presents his death not as a single tragic event but as a metaphysical unraveling, a process that erases both the external world and the inner self. The ending leaves us with the tragic paradox of Rothko’s life: the pursuit of transcendence through art, through negation, through color—and the realization that even in death, the search does not stop.

Copyright (c) 2025 PoetryExplorer

Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!

Other Poems of Interest...