Years later, Georgia claimed
she remembered exactly
the quilt she lay on
in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin,
before she could walk, its
red stars and white flowers,
her Aunt Winnie’s flowered
dress and golden hair.
Light rose to her fingers
from the half-dreams
of childhood, and sank,
the way dreams do
on waking. An ache, a vague
joy is left, and Rorschach
shapes riding the cusp
of what one takes to be
real, the material world or
the dream, depending
on one’s education.
The assignment was to sketch
from a plaster cast of a baby’s
hand. The sister
at the convent school wanted
it larger, like a sign,
and light as an angel lifting
up to God. Even then,
Georgia understood in
her black heart the
subversion required for art.
She made everything
bigger than it should be
and temporarily delicate.
She put influences away, began
her life again on hands
and knees with charcoal and rough
paper, rubbing shapes until
her body ached, a lunatic, working
into her own, unknown. By June
she needed blue: for two
thin flames, one a cocked
elbow, Georgia exact, a flute’s
height and edge, hungry as jazz,
little stomachs of blue pulled
into the rise. She lived, then,
entirely in her body, her blue
blood breathing no air but
rising like mercury out of her will.
“At last, a woman
on paper!” Stieglitz said in
New York when he hung her
raw intentions where
Rodin, Picasso, Cézanne, had been.
“But Stieglitz,” a critic said,
“all these pictures say is ‘I want
to have a baby.’”
“That’s fine,” Stieglitz replied.
“A woman has painted a picture
that says she wants to have a baby.”
In Palo Duro Canyon, Georgia saw
long lines of cows, made them blood-
red eggs, raising yellow dust between
two mountains’ bones:
her nightmare of falling in.
Then she painted the evening star
broadcast yellow, orange, red, what
happens when you look too long, until
one star gives the sky
its meaning. The star is not
what you see but the rash result
of it. The star slips back from
your memory and is lost or free.
A man in a brown vest
observes jack-in-the-pulpits, painted
over and over, closer and
closer to the swelled
spike, the slit
of light. The trumpet flower
pillowed white toward its yawning
shaft. The sunflower spread
like a whore for the
bees. Georgia sits bolt upright
in the corner, enduring his
plod and gawk. Her hands lock
their secrets around
each other. She turns
her flowers loose. If this
man had been the one who stuck their seeds
into the soil, they would go on
without him, or die
of weeds, no matter, growing
again in wilder transformations. He
stands before Georgia’s monstrous
calla lilies, hands
in his pockets. Perhaps he has almost
discovered his small
importance in this process, and has
begun to look into his heart for
another point of view. She
watches the symmetry
of his limbs as they turn and
return almost against their will to
the same vaginal tease: a star, a bell-
shaped cry, “Come in, come in!”
I focus on her thigh, the wings
of her eyebrows. She is so lean
the film can’t find her, but
finds her messages, which
she has made to look like
herself. Posing makes her itch.
Stieglitz talks all the time,
drawing the line of his thoughts
around his friends. Lord!
I want my gallery white
and curtainless, the colors
exactly where they should be.
When we sweep the relatives out,
Lake George blackens and steams
toward winter; I can paint nude
in my shanty. Stieglitz walks down
for mail from New York, his black
cape flapping like a crow for news.
So now she needs the West.
Its bald light dissolves me
from her consciousness. All is new.
She paints bones six months a year.
In late fall, she comes to me
from the badlands, brazen with canvases.
The telegraph boy flags me down
in Abiquiu. By the time
I fly East, there is nothing to do
but rip the pink satin lining
from his coffin and sit all night
sewing plain white linen in.
Anything pared to the bone
needs interpretation, so
no one will be bored. You can’t
say look there, and there. Only
here, like a devotional.
Once, Georgia O’Keeffe stole
an immaculate black river stone
from a friend’s table with no
explanation, and she
is well-known to have painted
that same shape in a number of
excuses: the single alligator pear,
the sunflower’s eye,
the obdurate moon,
the hole in the pelvis bone. How
far it is to eternity, and how
little we have to go on! Stripped
of flesh, the pelvis bone
is capable of flying
open like a camera lens.
painting, like a curse, versions
of the door in the patio wall
at Abiquiu. It took her ten
years to buy that house, that
door, which had once been
sold for two cows, a bushel of
corn, and a serape. Still, it made
no apologies, a rectangular
door in a patio wall,
sharpened and scrupulous,
a place on the wall to
let your eyes
stop and collect their forces.
If anything went in or out, you
could see, and put a stop
to it, or be the only one
waiting, thus, the most beautiful.