Pelvis with Distance

(Georgia O’Keefe, 1943)

Bone                       and sky:
I waited my whole life

to be naked             Not nude,
which means unclothed

for the educated,
self-deluding eye—

that’s not naked,
that was putting on clothes

of the character I played
to stir the camera’s sighs

(a boy’s hips, a boat’s ribs,
Breasts like apricots,

a coarse curtain of hair
to pull or hide behind)

while critics lisped and gasped
about purity of line.

I             mean marrowed
by shrill trains of wind,

rilled by sunlight,
offered with no other

audience in mind.
Naked to myself, naked

to the God of all this space.
I mean bone and              sky.