My father was a painter who prided himself
on the accuracy of his trees. I wouldn't be surprised
if he named each leaf and limb
or if there's no heaven or hell, not even a subway station
when we die. In none of his paintings
does the lament of a chain saw run up the valley
and jump through my open window in January,
three days from my birthday, sixty five degrees.
I'm walking around reassuring the junipers and oaks I live with
that they'll not be cut down like the copse
disappearing to that chain saw where the river bends
as if changing its mind. I wonder how many trees
I've looked at or touched or climbed, at least seven thousand
is an answer, though not the right one.
I never saw my mother or father climb a tree,
or fuck, or look at the stars while holding hands
with each other or a planet, for that matter,
since their private life wasn't any of my business,
and a part of me, my spleen or left thumb,
is happy they're not around to see us kick
the Earth while it's down. After my father died,
my mother stared at the spaces he'd filled
and called to tell me she was doing this,
not in so many words but in all her silences.
Then she'd get embarrassed and say she had to go.
But she didn't go, she stayed in the recliner
next to his, watching leaves fall
from his paintings and onto the floor. Now
that she's dead, there are shadows on the walls
where the paintings were, and holes in the air
where the copse was, and nothing will matter tomorrow
the way it does now. It will matter differently.
My father's paintings have no people, and any evidence
they exist is old and falling apart. Barns
without doors. Homes with broken windows. Windmills
falling down. If there's a color called nostalgia,
it was his favorite. He once told me I don't think enough
about death, as if there's a required amount.  
But I was thinking about death as he spoke,
as he drove the car, as he looked like a man
who might look out the window and follow anywhere
wherever it was going. Something like that.
His paintings only think about death, I think
is what it felt like to walk around our house.
Thus my love for Chagall is not a betrayal
but a means of addressing a kind of starvation.
For color. And the refusal to admit we are bound
by a frame or god or stupidity, by anything at all.

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