Skip to main content

Winter Cottonwoods East V – 1952

“From experiences of one kind or another shapes and colors come to me very clearly.”
– Georgia O’Keeffe

She painted her canvas in my protoplasmic days.
Decades later
I drifted into its bramble of
burnt umber
raw sienna
mars brown
contradicting my assumptions of winter
disrobing them with her stark truths
so they could recline silhouetted
among naked trees.
She smudged branching crowns
but painted each cottonwood's body
with watchmaker precision.

She smudged branching crowns,
they haloed a deeper alchemy
each aerial poke
of Populous fremontii
melded
sky with tree
I felt tree tips
fray like fabric in the wind
drawing breaths of magnetic mists
pulling apart ionic swarms
swooning for photic kisses
each arboreal moment titillating and redefined.

I come home from desert and canyon,
filled with cottonwoods and tammies.
Their halos have blurred
my edges; I toddle back
blessed with ambivalence,
freshly plied
by wild water
strong light, my tips
feathering sand and stars.
Her painting has replaced my mirror.
I am winter cottonwoods,
titillated and redefined.
Redefining home
where it's simple
to seek the old folds,
return like willow root grooved into granite.
Hard to make space
for new shoots.
Put away the pruning shears!

Now I pray for my rain forest
heart to sing with my desert edges?
Share the words for
mother
sister
daughter.
Learn to paint in
burnt umber
raw sienna
mars brown.
Trust the naked alchemy
in my mirror of Georgia's trees.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Death Might Be Just A Holy Rend

  Death Might Be Just A Holy Rend And life a faithful pillow - a pillow to go flat, a spirit to drift off,  glaciers to melt and raise the sea. The blueprint is clear - Expect a tiny storm of mercy–  full of crows and bottle flies to debride the corpse,  to tithe the land.      And respect the putrid demise - things that fall apart make space for miracles.   Yet there persists the memory of breath rinsed in lavender and salt air. Then the dreams for blood and semen to revive, to metabolize  every tired, sad gospel into a hatch of octopus. Death confesses everything as she conjures her necrosis, as she feigns redemption, fools us with false devotion. She believes our defiance will set her free.   We must let grief to be the thread and needle to darn the rend, renew the cloth. then we can grasp the nascent green of winter wheat in spring.
Post a Comment
Read more

Covid Journal Entry 14

April 4, 2020 Today’s image – Exploring social cohorts. So, on campus now there is a small village of us living together, the remnants of those in residence this year.   We are an international population: seven from the US, six from Vietnam, five from China,   four from Morocco, one from the DR and two dogs/three cats.   We share four large buildings where we live, take our meals, study and exercise, on a five-acre campus. The rest of the two hundred and sixty or seventy odd community members are sheltering in their homes; some of the teachers and administrators dropping by during the week to work in their offices.   We have had little or no contact with them so far.   Our chef and his crew of two come in by rotation to prepare and serve the daily meals, a maintenance duo tend to the essential tasks and repairs, the city services haul away trash and recycling, the postal service, UPS and FedEx still deliver mail and packages.   It’s Iowa and the gove...
Post a Comment
Read more

Covid19 Journal Entry 13

April 3, 2020 Today’s idea – I want to follow a suggestion of looking at my situation through different lenses. A macro lens magnifies my considerations of things, hopefully so that I might notice what I’m overlooking. Peering through these eyes, I see life slow down and seem more intentional with the extended solitude of quarantine.   The introverted place in me is mostly fine with this state of things, until the longings for companionship or just hanging out with friends stirs up unruly emotions. These vex me because they take on the old voice of negative self-talk.   In this head space I can turn normal feelings of missing my family, particularly sons and granddaughters into an old loop of “they don’t mis me so much anyway because I’m not around like most good grandmothers are.”   I’ve even given myself a moniker, VAG, visiting aunt grandmother.   Somehow it makes me feel less consequential but still adorable.   We live out our choices and our strokes o...
Post a Comment
Read more