Free Entry 1, Week 9

Draft 2—Formally “Three Cows in a Pick-up"

Georgia O’Keefe in a Truck Stop

I am qualified for warning: which is to say
my clichés aren’t original. In New Mexico,
they put warnings down like rabid coyotes.
Those free-wheeling vagrants that prowl
the ditches for road kill like drunks digging
in payphones for forgotten quarters. Tuesday,

cactus pollination reduced monoxide emissions
to dwarf-sized complaints. Keyholes, really.
If the mayor of San Juan gave Georgia O'Keefe
a key to the city would she key the town dealership?
Call her vandalism a postage stamp? The gift of the forgotten
is that they force remembrance. I saw her:
Ram's Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills,
once at a truck stop, next to a shot glass

with three cows in a pick-up, and a pig at the wheel.
Both collector’s items. Incapable in the art of driving,
I once heard that O’Keefe bought a Model-A
right off the line. Secondary green like mildew
flowering in the split of the ram’s skull.
I drive without warning, she said, It’s key
to sand myself in landscape, to hound.
I would hock my teeth for all those dead coyotes.