My Father's Palette

I thought I understood what it was for,

like an unopened box of crayons.

It was always in the window room

with the splattered linoleum floor,

even when he wasn't. It was exciting,

like Felix the Cat's bag of tricks,

the primary splotches blending

one day in swirls of autumn russet-

the next in summer camembert

or winter's whited blues.

Or smeared, first muddy, then clear

with the molted rags of my youth

he soaked in that Lethean turpentine,

a stench that washed all colors

back to scratch: to the brown wood,

the kidney-shaped monument

to every vista he'd sold, or given,

or wordlessly stacked in the attic.

I liked to put my thumb in its thumb-hole,

or to see it humped with rigid blobs

left over from the day before,

when calmly as a surgeon in Emergency

he'd slit the skins-cerulean

or sepia-apply freshly oozing hues

to the erection of skewed fenceposts

enclosing his fields of revision:

all those long-abandoned barns,

complicated trees,

desolate plainscapes . . . .

But no people. Growing up

I couldn't fathom why he left them out,

always straining to glimpse

the profile of a human head

through the glare of his blank windows,

trying to see

what he saw

in uninhabitably old farmhouses,

fallow fields. When I asked, once,

he nodded and said something

I can't exactly remember:

how you didn't have to see people

to know they'd been there,

or could have been, and when I still

didn't get it, he fell silent,

vaguely disappointed.

I never asked again.

He probably thinks I still don't

understand his unpeopled landscapes,

their visual silences. But I remember

that time in Bermuda when, drowsy,

pretending to be asleep on the ugly

plaid couch of my parents' hotel room,

I watched my father quietly take in

all that was missing

in the mass-produced hotel painting.

I remember the boring waves

spraying over the boring rocks

on the wall, and with what restraint

he selected the skinniest brushes

and the tubes for fleshtone

and for swimsuit crimson, stirring

on a tinfoil takeout plate.

And the placing of the lamp.

And how the smoke from his pipe

my mother didn't mind that night

drifted across and above

his intent frame as he bent

away from us in silhouette

to add, with minute strokes,

two far-off figures-maybe lovers-

to the utterly featureless water.

How he added always the human