Passion of Georgia O’Keefe

How bright the light! Baby sits on pillows,
white and black quilt with flowers and stars.
Dust sparkles warm and soft–I want to eat it
but Mama snatches and squeezes me hard.

I’m going to be an artist, make something beautiful
as the Maid of Athens in Mama’s book
or the Arabs on horseback in Grandmother’s parlor.
An artist can do as she pleases, no one minds.

Have drawn a man tumbling over, am painting
a lighthouse in clouds. Sister with big eyes
doesn’t like my small dark drawing of hands.
Must paint larger and lighter–purple lilacs, yellow corn.

Am disgusted with my work, and am glad.
Must forget everything learned, find the shapes
that are mine. I am the prairie thirsting.
I am the sky changing. I am the wind stirring.

My room is bare and white like a mirror.
In black, hair back, I walk toward the horizon blazing;
scorched, chilled, dust-caked, make my way
along gypsum trail down the mud canyon.

New York! At my easel on the highest story
I gaze upon roofs, trees, cliffs, clouds,
barges, bridges, smokestacks, soot-plumes, steel beams,
skyscraper crowned with chromium needle.

For hours I bathe in the light, as Stieglitz photographs
my hair, eyes, torso, long-fingered hands.
Fold on fold, clean pink, yellow, blue,
from my glass palette I paint the shapes in my mind.

Hipbone, labium, petal, leaf. In the deep green
veins arch apart; a lake settles in the center.
Lily, orchid, iris, rose, magnolia,
Jack-in-the-pulpit, poppy, petunia, trumpetflower.

Oh, the sun! Sweet-smelling desert sage.
After stupor of sadness, sand dunes, mesas,
wide blue space. How my heart races.
Eyes sharpen and soften, skull a flower of bone.

Seven a.m., cool morning, car under cliff,
I turn the car seat and paint. Brown, orange, violet, gray.
Peach slopes cook to red. Clouds boil up black
and thunderous, trampling the slopes to wine.

Climbing the ladder up to the roof–
how big the moon, and soft. Pale silver crawls
over black. Above, the vast dome of stars.
Asleep, I feel the tender fingers of first morning light.

Over my wonderful world the pink and blue dawn
spreads to the snow-capped peak
of Sangre de Cristo, faraway and serene.
Purple asters waken on the shimmering plain.

White Place, hills of ancient lava ash
turreted and spired with gray and red.
Black Place, pink and gold-veined, rollicking elephants
where sea once pounded and dinosaurs fed.

That’s my mountain–Blue Pedernal
where Changing Woman was born. God told me
I could have it, if I painted it enough.
Never good enough, my failures lead me on.

Maria loads on food, logs, water, canvas, the cat.
Car inches along the dry riverbed.
I shovel sand, chop sage, roll away rocks,
paint with my gloves on in the wind.

At forty-five I take what I want–
Ghost Ranch on golden plain. Purple hills,
rotting cedar, light that illumines death.
The world is always at war, atomic lab just miles away.

Empty pelvis. Pelvis bursting with sun.
Winged pelvis with moon. Antler, jaw, sacrum–
the immortal body. Shadows lengthen, colors fade,
I paint alone until dark. I chose my fate.

Stieglitz is gone. Friends go too. Red hills
whiten with snow. Nearer and farther
a large black crow flies over the slope
into clear cold night.

I know what I must paint now–I paint
what I love. Instinct directs me.
Flowers, stones, bones instruct me.
Details are confusing–I observe, select, eliminate,

ruthlessly search for meaning inside things.
Tearing roots from my heart,
arrange in ever broadening light icons, offerings,
blessings that come from, return to life.

That door leads to my paintings. It’s a curse
the way I keep painting it–green, red, from the side,
through the window, in shadow, with clouds, steps,\
snowflakes, leaf drifting by. Now my last door.

Sleeping in the patio on my white bed
I gaze out over Green Valley.
Rocks and horns rest on the wall, patted pink
adobe skin soft against the dusty sky.

Have I gone mad with love? Everything
in my house lives! Listen, they call me
white-haired sorceress. In long black skirt
I stroll with my stick and ferocious chows.

My housekeeper tells me the names
of the colors and passing clouds.
My vision is blurred. Under wrinkled hood
my turquoise eye sees. I work–what else is there?

Sitting still in the sun I’m happy.
The sky is my companion. My spirit moves
in this light. Soon my ashes will sleep in these hills,
as the wind trills on about nothing.

— Janine Canan

Janine Canan is the author of 13 books of poetry, most recently In the Palace of Creation: Selected Works 1969-1999. Her collections, Changing Woman and Star in My forehead: Selected Poems by Else Lasker-Schüler (translations) have received commendation from Book Sense, City Lights Books and Small Press Review. Her writing appears in Awakened Woman, Exquisite Corpse, Kalliope and Wemoon; and in dozens of anthologies including Birnbaum’s She Is Everywhere, Codrescu’s American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century, Cotner’s Pocket Prayers, Harvey’s The Divine Feminine, Muten’s Her Words, Laughlin’s New Directions, Ford-Gabrovsky’s Womanprayers, and Macmillan’s Women Poets of the World .

Canan edited Messages from Amma: In the Language of the Heart (“Best Spiritual Books 2004”); The Rhyme of the Ag-ed Mariness: Last Poems of Lynn Lonidier; and the award-winning anthology, She Rises like the Sun: Invocations of the Goddess by Contemporary American Women Poets. Her stories, Journeys with Justine, illustrated by Cristina Biaggi, and her essays, Goddesses, Goddesses, will be published in 2007.

Janine has taught poetry, and has given many poetry readings in milieu such as the City University of New York, National Poetry Week of San Francisco, Rutgers University, Shakespeare & Co. Paris, the Smithsonian Institute, Stanford University, and the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum, as well as on radio and television.

Born in Los Angeles in 1942, she is a Stanford graduate with distinction, received an MD from NYU School of Medicine in 1976, and is today a practicing psychiatrist in Sonoma, California. She may be contacted through her website. www.janinecanan.com

More of Janine Canan’s work here:

		The Birth
		Your unborn head is pulsing pushing out. In a spray your arms flop down, you swim into air. A sleeper you wake, you stretch, you wail. Beautiful breather you pale. From florid fish to flesh your fluid skin dries out to touch. Your eyes look round, stagger and widen. Your ears are spiraling. Your mouth untwists. Oh, you are open now!  Dear Body, gazing in the mirror it is you that I behold with thankfulness. You have been faithful these forty years. With only a sore knee at puberty, some intestinal rumblings before authority and teary outpourings in the face of love, have you occasionally asserted independence, disapproval, disregard of me. Nor can I seriously object to the lines in your brow that reveal where I have been thinking, or to the downward curve of your mouth that indicates grief I have carried since birth. Your nose I thought too wide, has lengthened with time that forces decision, and your white thighs that frightened me, console me through darkening nights.   What good shoulders you have, I admit; your soft breasts amaze me, and curving mortal hips. When I see you naked so, still scarcely known, I wonder, have I not served you well enough, neglecting, depriving you of proper lovers– the surging, languorous caress of bluegreen ocean, the wild and powerfully exacting dance. What a different story had I lived for you, my devoted, solid, healthy Body, with your hands of a potter or a surgeon, strong enough to gather grain for a life of simple satisfying eating. What patience you have shown this lethargic, sedentary, moody being who borrowed you, she claims, for higher reason. Sitting waiting, while she thinks and dreams, craving only quiet spaces, beauty in which to lose herself on ever longer, more voluptuous and deeper journeys, you must be a saint. With your delicate, hyper-sensitive nerves– painstakingly cultivated by erratic Mother Karma who one moment forgets, the next grips violently, so aware everything irritates or gives you overwhelming pleasure, ecstatic wicked Body, maniacally driven from one unreachable extreme to another, isn’t it obvious how, torn between joy and terror, you became a poet, passionately vibrating instrument, house of the certain yet doubting, ever shifting eye. Earthbody, brief spouse, what a strangely inconvenient marriage. Yet you are my only true support. And though you may never fathom what I secretly am, may you– who accepted the nature of existence itself– stay with me in your lovely halo of death till I depart, dearest Body, my slave, my queen. (Her Magnificent Body)