Skip to main content

Winter Cottonwoods

“Well, I made you take time to look at what I saw…” – Georgia O’Keeffe

1954
she paints the canvas
Winter Cottonwoods East V.

Burnt umber
and raw sienna
render limbs

to transcend
all sense
of sleeping sap.

Within her
smudged pigment,
out of wintry light

emerges
an odd alchemy.
Countless living stems

press into thin air
in a maze of wands.
Even leafless,

slow and steady
respirations
stitch tree with sky
in secret marriage.

2004
she is the canvas
Winter Cottonwoods East V.

I draw in
burnt umber
and raw sienna

to assuage
my melancholy
since leaving

olive tammies1
and silver sage.
I make a pact

to swap mirror
for trees
naked now

beside my bed.
This morning five
purple finches

pried open black hulls,
plainly melding
bird and flower
budding in song.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

2020 Pandemic Journey Day 44

May 4, 2020 Today’s idea – What has the fog of our modern conveniences begat? I read an article last night published in 1950 by Berton Roueche’ titled The Fog . In October 1948, a toxic smog settled on the borough of Donora, PA. This town is tucked away on a meander of the Monongahela River in the Allegheny Mountains.   During that time, it was home to three huge mills, a steel plant, and a zinc and sulfuric acid plant. The towering factory stacks of these industries pushed out thick plumes of coal smoke all day and all week. Also, given the town’s proximity to the river, boats and trains added their emission to the cocktail. To seal the deal, Donora sits in the topography of secluded bluffs and hills that allow for little or no wind to carry the smoke and fumes out of town.   So the place was known to be a smutty, smokey mess, tolerated by residents who referred to the sulfurous stench as the smell of money. On this weekend in October, a thermal inversion put a tighter li...

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.

First Snowfall

with minute focus the sun finds me it's a mirror I can't ignore first snowfall  extols the glory of winter and sunrise explodes into a billion shining moments   bouncing snowy limb to limb I am the trampoline  learning to find resilience in the synergy of 10 am  when radiance is bucking its boundaries erupting with an ode to joy pretending it's just an avalanche surging sunward on tiny feathered engines and if I resort to chasing the jet-streams I'll never learn the art of making my road  authentic  and bringing us home