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| John Elmer O'Brien, 1935 |
Keep to your field of color,
Smell of linseed up from the cellar,
Oils thinned and soaking into the canvas,
Failed-artist father trying again,
Decades too late in his sad privacy.
Shake free if you can.
These days I'm on the cabin porch
With a thermos of decaf, watching a corn-snow,
Dumped from the raised beds of purple clouds,
Roar through the oak and maple crowns
Like Ohio River gravel sliding into a foundation hole,
Sepia white incipient green.
Someone to read this.
Someone to know.
Someone to tell me.
Someone to lie.
Never, never, never like him,
Self-pitying father to please who can't be,
Masterwork finally his Pollock-like splatter
I would wash from the blue bedroom wall,
Color soaked into the pillow.
Never like him.
Someone to read this and tell me they did,
Someone to welcome the ice-yellow sun.
Tracks in a late-season snow
Circle graves.
Never like him, never like him.
Never, never, never like him.
—after the work of American abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler
