Jeff Burt

After Purple Hills, Ghost Ranch (1934)
–Georgia O’Keefe

I look intensely for the Ghost Ranch
but it’s not in her painting—
it is in her perspective, where her eyes
and feet resided while her brush worked,
the ghosts alongside her,

and perhaps given up on love for a person,
she included herself as a ghost,
an afterlife haunting of a landscape
neither friendly nor desolate,

a tired purple, not majestically purple,
not the purple of sage,
but earthen purple, of old iron red
that caught some touch of blue sky
and held it. 1934—the year named,
perhaps to recall the exact haunting.

When I step back,
as I stare at the canvas,
I feel the lost loved ones of my life
pressing around me,
I feel my hands weaken, their clutch
like a raptor’s talons released,
and I no longer need to wish those loved
into my world any longer,
I have a need perhaps
to inhabit the world of the ghost ranch,
to just view, no longer insert myself
into the image I make.
1973, friend Phil dead
upside-down in a ditch,

I watched the winch crank
the car toward the road,
the frail purple of clover
lining the ditch.
Sometimes there is no hope
and one needs to move on,
but spaces enter a person,
spaces reside in a person
no less than a person
resides in a space.
Ghosts of who we have been linger
within us–she moved from hills to skulls,
the intimacies of flowers,
mingling death and life,
art no longer distant, she a part.
And so I move.

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, spending the seasons dodging fires, floods, earth-shaking, and all the other scrambling life-initiatives. He has contributed previously to Williwaw Journal, Heartwood, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Willows Wept Review. He has a chapbook for free download at Red Wolf Editions and a second chapbook available from Red Bird Chapbooks.