Without

Without

I wore mint, flowers, against my summer skin

I pressed my body into iron ochre

sank myself into rain-loosened earth, under this

 held my head toward the sun,

closed my eyes

felt loved

I read that Georgia O’Keeffe “confessed that she

sometimes fantasied about lying nude

on the dry, hot, reddish slopes” of Abiquiu

I wonder if she, too, wanted the purity of warmth

simplicity, movement’s beauty without external soundings 

I thought then of all the times I’ve pressed my body

against this earth to feel momentarily

without the complexity of layering, of overlapping  

I remembered Alejandro who poured honey

over my body, that honey, and pressed those magenta flowers

onto me, into that miel, into me, those flowers, matched my lips 

I laid there in honey and flowers and bees and sensuality

on hot earth as he photographed me, my shyness, there 

I tried to see beyond the construct of camera

beyond film, man, and what seemed a thousand layers

of honey, of flowers, of nudity, of sad insecurity

I thought of how different I am alone in beauty 

 in absence with earth and my skin

and a sky that lights it with a thousand colors

how simply I turn my head toward sun

close eyes, feel loved  

and not without

---

I often return to fragments of "A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe" by Laurie Lisle.  I've felt a certain connectedness to O'Keeffe since I first discovered a painting of hers on a greeting card (of all places).  And I've been drawn to New Mexico, one of her many homes (and perhaps the most "home" of any, yet who am I to say?) since my parents brought me there when I was ten.  I've since returned on a few occasions, and each time feeling a sense of belonging.  The subtlety of layers of reds and sages, and the intensity of the sun, and the immensity of the sky, and my thoughts of her, Georgia O'Keeffe, wandering alone in those hills to find things that speak, this all spoke to me, there.  And it was in Santa Fe during long nights and long bicycle rides that I began to allow myself to process the death of my mother and father, admit to myself a certain loneliness, a certain aloneness.  In the past years I've thought of moving, packing my things once again, going to feel the sun and to sense a different earth; I've thought of moving to the place where I first felt my own strength again.  And yet, this place, Vermont, too, holds me, not as all places do.  Here I have the space to wear flowers and mud and rain and let them melt into me as I do into them. And I think it is this, this more than the red dust on my legs and cheeks, more than the endless skies, that I yearn(ed) for.  I desire(d) to feel so close to a place, so at peace in a place, so alone in a place, that I can feel all its intensities inside and outside of me.  It was this closeness that I felt under this streaked sky.  I was in a space without and yet with everything--without eyes and voices, and yet with a love for being, so pure, and so full of joy.  

---

I Want to Tell You How

I want to tell you how

I want to tell you how

orange emerged from grey-blue clouds and how

the darkened ridge became your cheek at night

                    and the glow, the unspoken safeness of your skin 

I want to tell you how

this orange span of light is the sadness of distance, is

absence stretched across the sky, lined reminder of

                    looking up and looking out without each other

I want to tell you how

this orange is my thankfulness for you, your presence

for memory offering the past in this present

                    to walk through my days with only these distilled fragments

I want to tell you how

this orange is seeing summer in your blue eyes

mercurial sky, and I, held there in iris, in water

                    where I never knew I could feel such solidity in love

I want to tell you how

this orange holds a depth of connectedness

one that was, no longer is, absent under the grey of our winter

                    and so now I see you on the surface of every flower

I want to tell you how

this orange is my love for you, this love is as color

constant pulse of absorption, a phenomenal reflection  

                    a gift so overwhelming, so encompassing, so drawing   

---

It was a dusk of enrapturing light and wind.  I was held by grey-blue clouds to the west, by burning orange to the north, by a sherbet streaked sky to the east, and by a rising moon slightly south.  The orange in particular compelled me to think about the first nasturtium I saw this summer.  When I saw it, he was out to sea, and we hadn't yet had the chance to behold a flower dabbled space together.  And so though I felt love for him, I did not see him within this, and so my mind traveled elsewhere and to a familiar line about a circular orange flower.  But now, having spent these warm months together, having cut flowers for the dinner table, having made crowns and worn them in our hair, having them as a backdrop to home, I see him in every nasturtium, in every flower.  This proximity in absence allowed by seeing someone in all things seems like quite a gift, a painfully beautiful gift, one we can choose to keep unraveling and unraveling as deeply as we dare to know.  

---

Water Sounding Words

Water Sounding Words

I don't know you

on this day, now

under a sky so blue

you know this place isn’t always this

way; this pond sometimes has no lilies 

and so I know what it means to forget

what it means to remember and

how a single flower becomes you

                                                      how the water is

                                                       right there, how

shallow the light becomes near dusk still, the sun, its

                                                      reflection

                                                     across this calm

         water sounding words

invites the memory, not as awakening

             just as one loving

the invitation of light

the equivalency of projection

                           of how we saw pinks like this ten years ago

                           of how you placed your finger into that yellow

as though to pull yourself to a different horizon

so far beyond that exhaustion

                              to a place sensing as a water lily knowing

when to close, to open

---

It was a morning of pervasive pink.  The color urged me on.  The magenta ironweed on the mountainside held my attention under a rare blue sky.  And then it was this, this water lily, petals so strongly opened toward the sun, that drew me to my mother and a moment at the end of her life when she, once again, found respite in feeling the heart of a flower.  

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