to Georgia O'Keeffe

Author's Reading (requires RealPlayer)

Searching,
plodding in sand-filled shoes
beneath blows of light,
you and I never met.
Yet I knew you in veinous ways,
in behind-the-eyes ways
where hot blue strikes mirros
in the secret vaults of knowing.

Exclaiming aloud and alone
when the desert showed me its bones,
its spiny life still and gray-green
or sidewinding I knew you

We passed at angles crossing
the parallax out on Hogarth's curve,
palimpsest for colors and shapes,
some knee-skinning some cheek-soft,
seeping in and out of each other
under a mallet of light.

You are willful and wild
as a spirit hawk. You are
lava glass trapping fire
under conchoidal wrinkles.

You are hands brushes eyes
no longer peeling light feeling
its pulse shedding it like snakeskin
to dry and iridesce on paper's tooth

but still living where I know you.

                            --Glenna Holloway
                 THE HOLLINS CRITIC, 1994