“Flower Dancing in the Wind”...

“Flower Dancing in the Wind”

a native woman, face upturned, her arms embrace the sky,

her left foot touches ground

at Woodin and Webster, Chelan, Washington

I was trying to make a photograph,

the landscape bathed in predawn blue.

I tried to catch the detail of her beadwork.

And suddenly it felt like being too much in her space.

In “Art: A New History,” Paul Johnson points out

lots of art found in museums

is out of context—medieval European alter pieces

and Egyptian sarcophagi.

And "certainly it is a mistake

to try and comprehend more than three or four...

works of high art

at a time."

He brings to mind the John P. Bradley watercolor

in front of which I feel

the wind and sea spray

and smell evergreens and rain.

Or how in the Seattle Art Museum my wandering was arrested by

Bartolome Esteban Murillo's "Saint Augustine in Ecstasy,"

his books fallen to the floor, his crozier mitre to the side,

looking up as though surprised.

There are so many ways art can be taken wrong.

But, however imperfectly in origin, context, provenance,

or in our missteps in relating,

art holds before us something like a neighbor to be known.