Museums

Museums

The New Yorker never mentions

The smell of linseed oil in the basement
Where my late father painted shadows
Out of synch with their suns.

His paintings hang in my living room

And lean against walls in the attic
Echoing di Chirico, and Hopper, and Wyeth
Like good shoes in marble caverns.

Nothing like, but not that different from

Ellsworth Kelly’s delicate plant drawings
With their fine, palsied lines
Hanging this summer in the Met.