had caught fire in the barn with some other things, but I didn’t throw it out since it was father’s. The green cushioned back and seat gone, but the legs and arms intact. Placed in my white-walled studio, its charred structure makes an unfinished drawing. What happens in a chair is enough to organize a life. “Sit down, listen,” he would say as I faced him and now the chair faces me. Funny how one can rule or fall asleep in a chair. How its skeletal form makes a jail of the wall, wanting to create a covenant? A chair needs a house, an audience. Now like a solitary word it bares white’s weight—tacit—and beneath the wall’s clock, it seems complicit in a farther ticking. “Come,” it says, “sit and be marked by the shadow of something.”