Do you recall which of these was O’Keeffe’s mountain? I have been looking
out on them all week and am still not sure, perhaps because I am facing from
the south. But I do understand now why she kept coming back to paint here,
where from hour to hour they are never the same mountains—although they
constantly abide. And there’s no contradiction in it. Ridge after ridge grows
paler in the farther light so the eye is finally driven to the fine abstraction,
appearing almost as remembrance, (as fine as Keats’ excess, and maybe
that is the place where painter and poet meet) that the vista holds. After A.S.
or anyone and everyone else, for that matter, it must have been what she was
painting for: to find, as we have, what holds.
— first appeared in Diner: A Literary Journal