How to O’Keeffe
Hold a bone to the sky
and blue unfurls its grace.
Forget scale. Nothing
is low or high, whole or half.
Spine, tree, cliff: seams
sewn into space.
Ears, first cousin to snails,
whirl rivers in circles;
fingers, rightly seen, are ferns.
Speak, and petals fall,
not words. This bleached light
strips chaos clean, corrects
our idle worry, our mistaking
burial for dead.
*
Ruth Hoberman is a writer living in Newtonville, Massachusetts. Since her 2015 retirement from Eastern Illinois University, she has published poems and essays in various journals, most recently Salamander, RHINO, and Nixes Mate.