— Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe

 

Vanishing point
     on the canvas
black cross with red sky
     hole in the skull
through which
     to see the sky
cow skull
     not representing death
just being a shape I liked…
     the landscape of the shell
or flower
     is the body female
womb
     labia
clitoris
     that is the desert
landscape
     – opening out.
"I'm going to paint it"
     she said,
"so big
     they'll have to look at it!
If I would paint that flower
     just that flower
the size it IS
     no one will
look at it."
     Student of the sky
seer of the land
     figure of the
evening star,
     mystic of the lonely horizon
mesa, mountain, surface of moon
     soul unadorned
reborn in the wetness of
     paint
your desert eternally alive
     on the canvas.
People asked her
     why she painted
flowers so big –
     why didn't they ask her
why she painted
     rivers so small?

 

Copyright © Leza Lowitz, 2003

Leza Lowitz was born in San Francisco in 1962. She has published two books of poems, Yoga Poems: Lines to Unfold By (Stone Bridge Press, 2000) which received the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Best Book of Poetry 2001, and Old Ways To Fold New Paper (Wandering Mind Books, 1997) as well as six books of translations from the Japanese, including the award-winning anthologies of contemporary women's poetry, A Long Rainy Season and Other Side River. For more about the author, see www.lezalowitz.com