An end to what you may never know

The White Place

For Georgia O’Keeffe

You will go there because you are expecting a misread
palace, perhaps, or because the coy moon will draw you in
like a bluffing poker hand, sere and uprising against lofty
bright craters that echo everything you cannot shout into them.

You will stay because she did—she of the wandering days
alone in the high desert where paint pored from her veins
the way promises of gold did in Old Spain, in Old California—
stay for the sheer ruin that comes from such misguided reliefs.



You will amble the desolate colonnades, windows thrown open
by rain and wind, the delicate osseotecture pressing fiercely down
above you tempering blood and reverence in equal measure, your
unscarved head bowed, your desire to sing arrested by insistent silence.

You will never leave because to do so would mean an end to
what you may never know, the price of what is possible too great
to merely barter away with departure, an imminent rapture keeping you always within what being here seldom fails to consecrate.

Joseph Gallo
January 27, 2013