Imagining Georgia O'Keeffe at Her Ghost Ranch
        'My pleasant disposition likes the world with nobody in it.'
                                Georgia O'Keeffe

I will never tire of the desert,
its severe hillsides, punctuated with mesquite,
its unsentimental trees, shrouded in dust.

Now that he has left me for another,
a few owls and a mourning dove are all that splinter the silence
spreading before me like a horizon.

I don't need more mourning, I want to
walk across the bristly desert floor
that the ocean turned into,
arrange some black stones in my yard
into a cordate shape I'll call My Heart.

I was shipwrecked here a few times in my life
and found restoration
under a pitiless sky.
Having let all the waters pour away,
the desert unwrapped me, and my flint faith,
bound to the Badlands rolling from my door.

I set my easel in plains of cinnabar and flax
so I can explore the palette of solitude,
capture the mandarin-dusted mountains, staggered against sky,
cliffs isolated in space, rising from the plateaux
in banana and persimmon and cream,
undulating mounds striated with celadon
and a lavender mist coating the distance.

Every day I scour the ground for fossil seashells,
little definite ghost-houses,
air-havens I could live in.

I'm free to gather the bleached bones of the desert:
deer horn, horse's pelvis, ram's skull,
to resurrect them in any context I like,
splay them open like butterflies,
dip them in bouquets of wildflowers,
suspend them above the ever-looming Pedernal.

This morning I trekked far into the Black Place,
because I could, because it was difficult,
because fear and pain were expecting me.

When I got back
I grabbed the ladder by the shed
and leaned it against the evening sky.
It needed nothing.

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Copyright © 2021 Judith Wilkinson All rights reserved
from The Manhattan Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission