Pilgrimage

This poem appears last in my chapbook,_Southern Girl Gone Wrong_, published by Foothills Publishing last November. (See link to the right.) I think the poem appropriate to post today since I'm in Albuquerque and will go to A Room of Her Own Women Writers Retreat in Toas, NM, at Ghost Ranch on Monday, August 22. (See AROHO link to the right.) Next week I may not blog regularly since access to computers is limited.

Pilgrimage

Between El Paso and Phoenix dust devils swirl
to Beethoven’s Fifth while sun burns my eyes.
Living in this forsaken land is unimaginable
until I see shadows fall on desert hills
beneath a stretch of sky. And I think of Georgia O’Keeffe

traipsing across New Mexico with easel and water colors dislodging
dark days of New York her lover old enough to be her father
posing her day after day in his studio

infatuations in black and white portraitures of impeccable restraint.

The year I’m born Stieglitz dies. She escapes to open plains
and cloud vistas where nothing presses
no camera traps no skyscraper blocks.
She expands into space

the whiteness of bone on red hills.