The Mountain She Painted Until She Owned It (Georgia O'Keeffe)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You painted flowers at the size
of the viewer's face —
calla lilies, jimsonweed,
the flower opened wide enough
to fill the frame —
and the critics called it sexual
because the body they brought
to your painting
had not been given any other category
to file a flower's interior under
and the misreading was not yours to correct
and you refused to correct it
because the critics who had reduced you
to their own vocabulary
had not earned the revision

[Verse 2]
You married a photographer
who photographed you relentlessly —
nude, clothed, at the easel, in the garden,
in ways you had not always consented to —
and the photographs made you famous
before the paintings did
and after the photographer died
you moved to New Mexico
and the air at Ghost Ranch
smelled like juniper and sage
and the particular dust
of a landscape that had been producing bones
for longer than the continent
had been named

[Chorus]
You painted the mountain
outside your window
twenty-eight times
and told a friend
that God told you
if you painted it enough
you could have it —
and the friend asked what that meant
and you did not explain
because explaining is the work a painting does
when the painter has decided
the painting is finished
and you had not decided the painting was finished
so you painted it again
and the mountain finally did
what the flowers had done:
belonged to the hand that had looked at it
long enough to be looked at back

[Outro]
You went blind in your eighties
and kept working —
assistants mixing the paint
and describing the shapes
you had already memorized
from fifty years of looking —
and lived to ninety-eight
in a house full of bones
that had outlasted the animals
the way your paintings
outlasted the critics
and the specific dry warmth
of a desert that had agreed
to let one woman
stay ninety years in its afternoon