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47 tHe way FarIng tree ––for Georgia O’Keeffe I thought the whole dream, an accidental find, a very private woman behind a cattle fence on Ghost Ranch whispering: “You’re over-dressed.” I follow her into the all-night diner on the highway nearTaos. She wears a long turquoise shawl and silver boots passing into gold. I’m wearing “the dress of seven joys and eleven sorrows.” Floppy eggs on black handled forks are freeze-framed before our mouths. On the outside edge of this photograph, her mouth opens like the gigantic flower she painted under the full lip of a quarter moon. Robber frogs barking on the riverbank join the laughter spinning on the café stools. It is hard like brutish boys throwing rocks at the girls’ ankles as they pedal home. Everyone she holds up to the neon steer sign is obsidian, an Apache tear with an invisible hinge rising on one side: They are all heart opening.At some point someone must have cranked open a window, the wind practicing through a pitch pipe the size of a rain stick. Swaddled into white bark she peeled off a birch at the edge of Lake George one summer, my body 48 lies as small as a cat’s she can carry on her backbones to the tree, this woman, I’ve never met face-to-face. I see now I am the script we are approaching: woman, lake, desert, tree. ...

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