Tunie: Mark Rothko Song

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A sad song by Dar Williams, from her album The Honesty Room.

The blue it speaks so full

It's like the beauty one can barely stand

Or too much things dropped in your hand

And there's a green like the peace

In your heart sometimes

Painted underneath the sheets of ashy snow

And there's a blue like where the urban angels go, very bright

Now the Calder mobile tips a biomorphic sphere

Then it swings its dangling pieces

round to other paintings here

Your behavior is so male

It's like you can't explain yourself to me

I think I'll ask Renoir to tea

For his flowers are as real as they are all the time

And the sunlight sets the furniture aglow

It's a pleasant time as far as people go, how far do they go?

Well his roses are perfect and his words have no wings

I know what he can give me and I like to know these things

I met her at the funeral

She said "I don't know what he meant to me

I just know he affected me

An effect not unlike his art,

I believe."

The service starts and we are in the know

He had so much to say but more to show, and ain't that true of life?

So we weep for a person who lived at great cost

Yet we barely knew his powers till we sensed that we had lost

A friend and I in a museum room

She says, "Look at Mark Rothko's side

Did you know about his suicide?

Some folks were born with a foot in the grave, but not me, of course"

And she smiles as if to say we're in the know

Then she names a coffee place where we can go, uptown

Now the painting is desperate, but the crowds wash away

In a world of kind pedestrians who've seen enough today