Georgia O'Keeffe, by Christopher Levenson

Black Placell, by Georgia O'Keeffe (USA). 1945.

Georgia O'Keeffe

Gone now the virulent
inwardness of flowers, their craving
purple and ochre gullets,
your hewn face, furrowed like nature’s  
baked landscapes of skull, adobe, rock,
Is reduced over decades to bone,
slowly erodes,  takes on canyons, agave.  
crowds in, concentrates
into mesa, red earth.

In the late photographs,
welder of colour, artisan of light,
you have been honed to abstraction,
you have become the mountain.
                              
Christopher Levenson

​Christopher Levenson, originally from London, England, has lived and worked in Germany, the Netherlands, and  India. He  is  the author of twelve books of poetry, most recently A tattered coat upon a  stick  (Quattro  Books Toronto 2017) and three chapbooks. He co-founded and was first editor of Arc Magazine.  After teaching English and Creative Writing from  at  Carleton University, in Ottawa, from 1968 to 1999, he moved  to Vancouver, B.C. in 2007,  where he helped to revive and run the Dead Poets Reading Series.