Georgia O’Keeffe, Pelvis Series, Red With Yellow, 1945

Georgia O’Keeffe, Pelvis Series, Red With Yellow, 1945

For Shira

Miles away, maybe it was dawn. 
At Ghost Ranch, in late June, Oppenheimer 
nursed a mint julep on the porch,

just another guest. Her bones weren't 
sacred, merely liminal, the hard 
memorabilia of animals, here bright 

instead of bleached, a fossil giving birth
to fire. She came to the desert knowing men
with all their fickle brilliance

could be secretly dead inside,
and so the gaping foramen 
a vacant stare, a glassless window, beyond

the primitive girdle’s stubborn calcium,
more of the world. She refused to avoid
the specious aspects when she summoned 

a thing into it, admitted them 
and was rid of them as a golden object 
absorbs any light not gold. 

David Moolten (He/Him)

“David Moolten’s last book, Primitive Mood, won the T.S. Eliot Prize (Truman State University Press, 2009), his chapbook, The Moirologist, won the 2023 Poetry International Winter Chapbook Competition and is forthcoming.”

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Author Note

I’ve been to Ghost Ranch, felt the beautiful austerity of the cliffs and desert resonate with the events which took place there. I appreciated more deeply—in my bones—the spectrum of human brilliance, how the marvelous and the monstrous came down to people, the mingling in small lives of ambition and loneliness, akin to how art and music coincided with the apocalyptic exploitation of the cosmos. The spareness of O’Keeffe’s own work and her resiliency, her understanding of men and women, their need to create, how it sometimes differed so keenly between them, provoked me to write this poem.

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