He painted corn rows Mondrian-straight,
seated in the sun on his tractors,
stacked his lush meadow hays
with Van Gogh's studied nonchalance,
and wintered baled straw in a barn
laved red like Turner's sunsets.

And didn't he echo each spring the classicists'
good shepherd, lugging calves from the cold,
or scan his summery cattle pasture
with the sweeping eye of a Rubens?

Artists and their works were foreign to him—
though he framed family photos,
à la Wood, against the gabled farmhouse,
reveled like Rothko in fields of vivid color,
and weathered pigment doubts worthy of Picasso:
hogs black–later white, cattle brown–later black,
tractors red–later green, but dogs ever golden.

His final canvas he composed from bed,
gazing through a window to the farm—
Move the tractor. Bring the horse to the corral.
Mow the weeds at the fence row.

His body of work brilliant in sunlight,
how to tell the farmer from his farm?

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Darrell Petska is a retired university engineering editor and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. His poetry appears in Verse-Virtual, 3rd Wednesday Magazine, Farmer-ish, Soul-Lit,  and widely elsewhere (conservancies.wordpress.com). A father of five and grandfather of six, he lives near Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife of more than 50 years.

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