My Father’s Studio, 2005 - Brad Richard

[Larry Robinson]

My Father’s Studio, 2005
As if browsing in a gallery, 
                     I flip through canvases leaning against the wall
                     behind my father’s studio. A clear October day, 

the air breezeless, birdless. Silence
                     still cloys like oily mud, two months
                     since the flood. The studio’s siding sags;

the back door won’t close. I look in:
                     heaps of clothes rotting, shelves of LPs, 
                     their jackets fused, some swollen books, 

and, further back in muck and shadow,
                     forty years of work my father made, 
                     and catalogues, and slides, and reviews.

I step back into the sunlight, 
                     look through the canvases again,
                     remember my father working on them,

and time unravels and I see myself
                     doing the things a ghost does, 
                     shuffling inside the narrow frame

of a world of ruined images. Yes, 
                     I remember these paintings. 
                     They were good. And I remind myself: 

he’s already repainting them. 
                     They’re still good. 
                     Stop acting like a ghost. 



	- Brad Richard
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