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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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