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 -

it’s a thrifty landscape

burnt umber

raw sienna

mars brown

it adores assumptions

of sleeping sap,

her alabaster basks us

in the fresh winter light -

with breath of gray
trees fill the thin air,
each knobby body

surrenders its precise edge

like fabric fraying

in steady wind -
their stomata breaths

quench a thirsty sky.

2004

o’Keeffe lives in painted canvas

Winter Cottonwoods East V,
I'm inspired with the landscape
burnt umber

raw sienna

mars brown

I’m flush with

sandy canyons,
weedy with tammarisk
smudged with sage, and

grateful for my assumptions

of the Cumberland Rim -

I swap the mirror

over my bed for

her naked cottonwoods

in open sky,

they quench a soul

thirsty for such thrift.

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