Pelvis with Moon, by Sharon Fagan McDermott

Pelvis with Moon, by Georgia O'Keeffe (USA) 1943

Pelvis with Moon
            
At the crest of this girdle of bone
a moon like a luminous mask
of the dead. I wonder what the earth
has made of you: a story of scaffold
ditched fragment, new history of sand.            

             How much does the spirit weigh
within the sacrum’s basin? Was the life
of your pelvis as a bed, a cradle for sons,
or much later, this chipped hull in a desert
graveyard used as an object for art?            

            O’Keeffe saw through to a sky
so blue it seemed a carnivorous eye
to make of itself both the sea and reflection
of sea in a landscape of dust. Her vision:
bones more swan than decomposed
cattle. The stark plank of beauty:
Ilium. Pubis. Ischium. Coccyx.            

             The world beyond muscle
and utterance. Your mouth shut in all
of my dreams. The vision I want to bury:
your sunken chest, the treasure
I should not take from it. Here’s a story:            

              a woman was called to the desert,
pared down. Black. White. She relinquished the flesh
and blood of her New York lover to live
among the earth’s slow jaws. And it revealed--
or she began to see—the hard relics: mud, clay,
bone, her own permission to be a voice
of the unearthed mouth.

Sharon Fagan McDermott

Sharon Fagan McDermott is a poet, musician, and a teacher of literature at a private school in Pittsburgh, PA. Her most recent collection of poetry, Life Without Furniture, was published by Jacar Press in 2018. It wrestles with both finding a home and feeling at home in the world and seeking sanctuary in an often challenging life. A generous artist award from the Pittsburgh Foundation, as well as a grant from PA Council for the Arts, allowed Fagan McDermott to create and publish three additional chapbooks: Voluptuous, Alley Scatting (Parallel Press), and Bitter Acoustic, winner of the 2005 Jacar Press chapbook award, chosen by Betty Adcock.