Two After Georgia O'Keeffe's Lake George, by Barbara Crooker

Lake George, by Georgia O'Keeffe (USA) 1922

Lake George, 1922
    
            I wish you could see this place—here—there is something
            so perfect about the mountains and the lake and the trees--
            O’Keeffe in a letter to Sherwood Anderson
 
Not stones and bones, not over-sized flowers, not sun-bleached 
skulls, but this: a glacial lake surrounded by mountains, a landscape
reduced to abstraction.  O’Keeffe removed the shoreline, distilled
the scenery to its elements.  Fused the mountain and its mirror image 
on the water’s surface as one design. I keep thinking about the ways
I could simplify my life, keep the essentials, paint everything extraneous 
out of the picture.
 
**
        
This poem was first published at Blue Line.
​

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Starlight Night, Lake George, by Georgia O'Keeffe (USA) 1922

Starlight Night, Lake George, 1922

I found that I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way—things I had no words for.
O’Keeffe
 
Over my single bed, a print of Van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhone,
while just to the right, the wooden window frames the exact scene O’Keeffe
painted: midnight blue lake, splotchy stars, globes of the dock lights
shining like tiny beacons. It’s both serene and ominous, a reduction
of shape and colour, the dark shoulders of the Adirondacks rising behind.
I’m not sure what lesson I’ve come here to learn as I shift from my ordinary
routine, only that stillness permeates this wilderness, punctuated
by the round notes of loons, and every breath restores my equilibrium.

​Barbara Crooker

This poem first appeared in Live Encounters.
        ​
Barbara Crooker is author of twelve chapbooks and ten full-length books of poetry, including  Some Glad Morning, Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Poetry Press, longlisted for the Julie Suk award from Jacar Press, The Book of Kells, which won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Poetry by the Sea, and Slow Wreckage (Grayson Books, 2024). Her other awards include: Grammy Spoken Word Finalist, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council fellowships in literature.  Her work appears in literary journals and anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature. 
www.barbaracrooker.com