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

Popular posts from this blog

Temerity

Helen holds hands with thunderheads. It helps when she's weak in the knees, lightning running down abductors, running down bones. Even temple guards succumb to such days, soft as pillows - scarlet velveteen on silk sheets.  Pink cyclamen bells the air, and Helen cut her traces. Bridget dreams the summer wind.  Its susurrate moan rises in waves, swells with tides of sandalwood to chariot the night.  She spins rhapsody around its howl,  dawns a golden jet stream  on spangled festoons of cirrus. Weak knees fly off with yellow wind,  before Bridget stills the night.   Sicily wets her lips with limoncello, quells the rabble of heartache, the clatter of waiting.  She rings goblets like temple bells, makes a sound map for lost days. Her boat of pink sand brims in blood oranges and cyclamen. Lightning festoons the rabble, Sicily finds Helen’s hand.

Covid19 Journal Entry 16

April 6, 2020 Today’s image – I was thinking about a news story from a couple weeks back. Las Vegas municipal services decided to manage their homeless population’s infection risk by moving these unfortunates to a parking lot that was taped off into spaces six feet apart.   Out in the open elements these displaced people were parked, while the hotels in the casinos stood empty.   Today, I listened to local news while sewing masks after school.   They interviewed the director of a local homeless relief organization that provided shelter to hundreds in our area.   The director mentioned that more often than not, these people live in such crisis already that they miss the big news stories or just decide to tune them out because they don’t want to stack more crisis on top of their own unsolvables.   She said they were managing the mandates of the outbreak dangers with federal funds that were matched by community funds to put up their homeless clients into hotels in the area for the d

Momentous

This moment is liquid, breached with spring peepers, It is sandalwood smoke lifting prayers to Lakshmi, Lifting standard bearers, it ups the ante. It is a cool breeze up a cervical column,   shivering  in Morse code, a genetic ladder to the roof, to Jupiter to a far black hole in one. Nebulas yawn a kaleidoscopic Neverland promenade, and gravity waves sing their arias of emptiness and full again, in nano-rhyme, in tiny grand statements. This moment is rich in grandchildren and great grandchildren, grows thin with constant attention, runs curious as coyote, moans in silken orgasm. This moment is ready as 4 o'clock. It swirls perdition within paradise, it bobs on Adriatic waves, swells with orphans adrift, threatens to wash us away. It uncurls sad lingering memory, clings to vital shadow kin. This moment is mitosis: gold to lead, sunflowers to chickadees, you to me. It has folded the day into 366 paper cranes, each head upturned. This mom