I didn’t know then that devotion
was jumping off the high dive into a pool
though there was no life guard,
though there was no telling
what or who else was in that water.
I didn’t know devotion would mean
tattooing another’s face to my forehead
the way Frida once did with Diego—
how the whole world would be able to see
what I thought was invisible.
I didn’t know devotion meant walking barefoot
into the wind, a wind so strong it shredded my coat.
Didn’t know my destination
would become so unknowable,
would remain so far away.
Perhaps I thought it would be more mechanical—
as if the nuts and bolts of you
would meet the nuts and bolts of me,
and through sun and rain we would fuse together,
belly to belly, nose to nose.
Instead, I meet devotion now
the way I once met Georgia O’Keefe’s clouds
in the stairwell of the Chicago Art Museum.
I stared at the giant painting, thinking to myself,
That’s not at all what it’s like.
Years later when I visited Abiquiu,
I saw the sky so true to what she’d painted,
gasped to see that herd of perfect ovals
flocked white above the red land.
Perhaps this is what devotion is like—
being willing to trust I know nothing at all
of what it looks like. That the only way it reveals itself
is when I meet it with wonder, the way I might meet
the work of a master, willing to be curious,
willing to be awed.
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