My First Still Life

My initial impression
was red: a poppy field,
a sunrise, an umbrella.

I saw Impressionism for the first time 
at the Denver Art Museum
during high school. I knew

little of art except what
my childhood home’s west-facing
picture window framed of my

family’s farm in Eaton: the milk barn 
with wooly ewes in the foreground,
Longs Peak dressed and undressed 

in winter’s cloak as the background.
Weather was my first encounter 
with life’s death colliding 

sometimes with such resonance, 
yet other times with such dissonance.
My dad, the farmer and patient painter, 

dabbed the dirt canvas 
with small brown seeds 
that grew for weeks, months 

into swaths of shamrock-colored crops 
against a powdery, 
puffy blue sky.

I remember summer’s betrayal
in July, a storm: Hail pummeled the crops 
a disheveling form. My dad

stood at the picture
window with his hands clutching
his sweat-stained Pioneer Seed hat.

Before him lay crops, a hazy
replica of life, and dappled
light striking what I could

barely make out of blurred
shadows cast from the bruising
sky. My first impression

of Monet, Renoir, and Cézanne 
at the art museum—though I knew not
their names—was I’ve seen this before:

broken brush strokes, faded contours,
opposing backgrounds and foregrounds,
and long shadows of still life.

For there is one artwork to marvel:
the steady faith of a farmer
to sow and reap season after season.

My father never disgraced the hail,
nor the drought that hit a few years later;
he waits, still, for a new creation.