to put on paper anything I choose
to satisfy a fine kind of hunger.
What is it I want to say?
My ideas are still in a liquid state
forming blue shadows.
Isn’t dark curious, enormous, intangible?
Sometimes it chases you.
I feel like beefsteak broiled
not done in the middle,
my mind ravenous
the lid on a boiling kettle.
Everything contradicts the other
uprooting, twisting and turning.

I want to paint a woman
with nothing on but her skin
so damnably free
without the weight
a trembling kind of sweetness
untouchable, soft and feathery,
all water colors, stretched out
intensely alive—
a bigness that carries me away
an explosion I’ve been growing to all my life.

I’m beginning to realize
what seeing means.
Being so afraid makes it all the finer,
a kind of balance
headed for something
more feeling than brain—
the world softening
like green moss.

~ Cento of lines/phrases found in “My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915-1933