This poem came to me this week through a New Mexico friend, and I loved it immediately. When we visited O’Keeffe’s house in Abiquiú a few years ago, I was struck by the ordinary work of her life – the large vegetable garden, the kitchen stocked with ingredients and cookware. She was both extraordinary and a “plain woman.”
We just came off a weekend of allowing our house to be used for a location for a film crew shooting a commercial, and whatever else that endeavor is, it is the work of hands. Carrying, prepping, decorating, shifting lights and angles, signaling “quiet on the set” after saying it. Setting up and breaking down. There is the thing being made and then the regular, physical labor of making it.
“These are hands that mix paint,
decipher sky. With these hands
I scratch my head at the improbable.”
