I can’t lose with this one. If someone doesn’t like it I can tell them it’s self-demonstrating, and of COURSE they didn’t like it, since it is a Wasted Effort…
Wasted Effort
We now no longer have Ms. G. O’Keeffe
And so we lack a mattriarchal Chief
Since passing Time’s an unrelenting Thief
There’s reason to crack open that Cointreau–O
Epiphany may quell the need to know–oR
Deem it best we bid à bientôt
One fateful day in the mid-1970s I had the extraordinary privilege of being in the same room with both Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keeffe. They were in Tucson, where I was a student at the University of Arizona, for the opening of the U of A’s Center for Creative Photography. And they were attending a meet&greet in the lobby of the campus’s Museum of Art, right next door to the Art Building, where I spent a lot of time toiling at Painting and Life Drawing and Printmaking and such.
Ansel Adams was cheerful and accessible, a sort of out-of-uniform Santa Claus. Georgia O’Keeffe was different. Dresed in a floor-length black dress, she leaned tripodally on her blackcane, her deep-set eyes wide and glittering, not saying a word. She was tiny and looked quite frail.
But she did not SEEM frail. She radiated Power. Her gaze was like a wide-beam laser. The vibe was of her being all-seeing and all-knowing.
I was there about half an hour and in all that time the dozens of people in the room respected Ms. O’Keeffe’s space and silence. They made up for that soundless proximal vortex by flocking around Adams and peppering him with questions. He held forth jovially, magnificently. Nicest guy on Earth, in his element and in his moment.
Ms. O’Keeffe was in her element as well, in her realm of observation and contemplation. She reigned.
Not So Frail
Needles point to skin and coif. Omnipresence throws them off. For Truth is Power and talent Soars. A sense of Place is Boat and Oars. I owe this Georgia Peach some Soul.
“Into each life a little rain must fall.” Thank Goodness for such unparched earth as results.
The triple acrostic was tricky when I added the stricture of keeping the total word count under 25. It comes in at 23 when you include the acrostic words. Rhyming L and I didn’t happen, though it could’ve if I could’ve worked in Bain de Soleil and Feng Shui. Didn’t, because a) I’d already done that with another acrostic and b) the far more important fact that it would’ve been nonsensical.
Here’s the four-line, triple, 23-total-words, only-one-of-the-couplets-rhymes-well acrostic:
invigorate your wherewithal
now add a dash of calamari
to generate a cleft motif
of mr. bosch and ms. o’keeffe
How this drawing came to be: Last February I sent my friend Karen, who has done me innumerable favors, a dozen yellow, meaning Friendship, roses, with a card that read KAREN, YOU ARE ALWAYS THERE. I SURE APPRECIATE IT. LOVE, GARY. After she got them and thanked me I asked her to please send me a photo, since I’d never seen them. (We live in different cities.) She graciously did so, and I started a drawing based on the photograph, then stopped in mid-line, following the “put this away for a while” hunch. Today I had another look at it, and the oxymoronic “Rose Fell” popped into my head. Then Faye Dunaway, in a western-southern accent, in LITTLE BIG MAN: “…and I am a Fallen Flowah.” Then Arthur Brown, self-proclaimed “God of Hellfire,” sang the opening lines, quoted above. Then a slide show of Man’s Inhumaneness to Flora and Fauna informed my acrostic.
About Arthur Brown Wikipedia has these trivia of interest:
“Brown quickly earned a reputation for outlandish performances, which included the use of a burning metal helmet, that led to occasional mishaps, such as during an early appearance at the Windsor Festival in 1967, where he wore a colander on his head soaked in methanol. The fuel poured over his head by accident and caught fire; two bystanders doused the flames by pouring beer on Brown’s head, preventing any serious injury. The flaming head then became an Arthur Brown signature.
“On occasion he also stripped naked while performing, most notably in Italy, where, after setting his hair on fire, he was arrested and deported.”
Lastly, one definition of “fell” is an adjective meaning “likely to cause or capable of causing death.” Grateful acknowledgment is given Merriam-Webster, available online.
One with Clay, Image and Text 