<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);" class="">My Father’s Studio, 2005</span><p class=""><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);" class="">As if browsing in a gallery, <br class=""> I flip through canvases leaning against the wall<br class=""> behind my father’s studio. A clear October day, </span></p><p class=""><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);" class="">the air breezeless, birdless. Silence<br class=""> still cloys like oily mud, two months<br class=""> since the flood. The studio’s siding sags;</span></p><p class=""><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);" class="">the back door won’t close. I look in:<br class=""> heaps of clothes rotting, shelves of LPs, <br class=""> their jackets fused, some swollen books, </span></p><p class=""><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);" class="">and, further back in muck and shadow,<br class=""> forty years of work my father made, <br class=""> and catalogues, and slides, and reviews.<br class=""><br class="">I step back into the sunlight, <br class=""> look through the canvases again,<br class=""> remember my father working on them,</span></p><p class=""><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);" class="">and time unravels and I see myself<br class=""> doing the things a ghost does, <br class=""> shuffling inside the narrow frame</span></p><p class=""><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);" class="">of a world of ruined images. Yes, <br class=""> I remember these paintings. <br class=""> They were good. And I remind myself: </span></p><p class=""><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);" class="">he’s already repainting them. <br class=""> They’re still good. <br class=""> Stop acting like a ghost. <br class=""></span></p><p class=""><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);" class=""><br class=""></span></p><p class=""><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);" class=""><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>- Brad Richard</span></p></body></html>