In the Woods

by Elizabeth Tibbetts

He used a child’s paint box and a kitchen
saucer for mixing.  Trillium and poppies tower over
cattails bordering a stream.  Proportion means nothing
here, perspective little, though he could build

a house he had drawn inside his head.
Water lilies, purple violets.  No evidence
of gas mask, helmet, dog tags, maps of France —
the Great War hidden in a chest in the attic.

A path winds down to the water.  The paper
cuts off flow, clover, fallen limbs, so the woods
stretch on forever.  Across his street
old white pines let down strands of light

to the needled floor, where mourning cloaks
flitted.  Farther in, water walkers skimmed
a shaded pool.  Finches rocked his feeders,
and peaches and plums, despite winters,

weighted trees he’d planted.  Notwithstanding
mustard gas and running loaded stretchers
through blood, mud, bodies, and the hard,
sometimes-sweet years after, when frail,

deaf, but still sure-sighted, with a quiet hand
he painted Wild Flowers in the Woods — a scene
lush as love, yet wall-paper flat, as though we
would never need to enter, we were already there.