Coping With Awe, by Bonnie Proudfoot

The Shelton with Sunspots, by Georgia O’Keeffe (USA) 1926

Coping with Awe
 
"You wouldn't always see it that way, but I just happened to see it with a bite out of it." 
Georgia O'Keeffe, New York City, 1926
 
There are moments in the city
when buildings part
to let the light come through.
This can happen, say,
on a winter’s afternoon,
just before sunset, when the light
slants eastward from the river,
and blazes in the glass and steel.
I can mistake my own direction,
forget where the Shelton Building is,
find myself at the Flatiron instead.
I watch the narrow widen,
the low arc of brilliance rising
a corona that anyone who
dares can wear, sunspots
rising like living orbs.
And then? I hear the men
talk of writing the great American novel,
painting the great American painting,
but they don't see what I see.
They only use their eyes.
What about ten thousand eyes
staring into ten thousand suns,
each one biting away blackness and steel,
blackness and steel and glass
the master work of all proud masters,
obliterated. That is my awe.
No other way
but to paint it, then, nothing
left to do but leave them
to their squabbles.
The language of the world
is not the same as the language
of the heart. I will never
stop trying to translate it.
I will follow the light.
 
Bonnie Proudfoot
 
Note: The italicized sections are quotes from interviews with the artist. 
 
This poem was previously published in Sheila-Na-Gig online.
 
Bonnie Proudfoot is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and reviewer whose work has appeared in many online journals and anthologies. Her novel, Goshen Road  (OU / Swallow Press), was Longlisted for the PEN/ Hemingway and received the WCONA Book of the Year Award. Her recent book of poems, Household Gods, can be found on Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Her interest in art emerges from a family connection as her Great Aunt Annette Nancarrow was a surrealist painter who lived and painted in Mexico for decades. Proudfoot is also a practicing glass artist. Her writing and artwork can be found at https://bonnieproudfootblog.wordpress.com/