In this summer of Oppenheimer (and Barbie) mania, Chapin poet Randy Spencer was reminded of this poem, which he read in 2002 at a gathering for Richard Rhodes when he came to USC for a discussion of his "The Making of the Atomic Bomb." Jasper is pleased to share this with you 21 years later.
Georgia O'Keeffe Discusses Her Poem
[1945] My Ghost Ranch in New Mexico is due North
of Los Alamos. I have painted two canvases of the sky
pouring through the pelvic bones of cows, the first where
that light is deep blue, and the second where the sky turns
yellow and blood seems to pore from the circle of bone.
Pelvis III, 1944, Oil on Canvas, 48 x 40
Pelvis Series, Red and Yellow, 1945, 36 x 48
Pelvic bones, held up, are wondrous against the sky's blue
I felt would always be there, fixed, long after Man's
Destructiveness is finished. Cut sharply, they are a beauty
At the center of something unique, both horrifying and grand,
Empty, yet keenly alive. Perfect ovals, my eye captures
Them as elopements toward Infinity, absent any middle ground,
No perspective intervening between Birth and Death, treasures
I searched for among the camposantos until they were found.
Now red encircles the yellow, the acetabulum, the vinegar cup,
The foramen of blood, Batter, then, my heart,
Oppenheimer, quoting Donne, Three-personed Deity, now his Trinity,
His opening of an orifice for God to sculpt.
What colors, I would ask, could be left for the pacifist artist
Who magnifies emptiness, who paints Death against the desert sky.
- Randy Spencer
Photos courtesy of the Georgia O’Keefe Museum
Randy Spencer is a retired child psychiatrist living on the lake in Chapin. He is a published poet and short story writer, who most recently was a Pushcart Award nominee for a poem about the Ukraine war. His upcoming book from Muddy Ford Press is a series of interconnected poems taking place in Andersonville Military Prison in Georgia during the Civil War, but the themes are universal and timeless. He is currently working on a novella that reimagines Remarque's classic World War II novel, A Time to Love and a Time to Die, but is set in the current conflict in Ukraine.