The Fourth Wife: 13 Lines for Artist Ray Boynton (1883–1951)

I never knew that the 3rd wife passed on the work of an artist’s wife to me. She gave me “The Box.” The box rode in the back seat of the Ford 500 Galaxy, my 1975 car, and me just thirty-five, too young to be married to a sixty-eight-yearold dead Art Maker. I ferried it across Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, home of the bourgeois middle class, stable enough to clean, preserve, restore, frame, organize, sleuth, make it up, travel to see, hire a photographer, digitize, post, present, visit the archives, sleuth some more, distract, propose, present, sleep with documents, chase after records, cornfields, catalogue, compose bibliography, write, revise, rewrite, PowerPoint, my whole life. S A N D R A M A R E S H D O E M E T R O P O L I TA N S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y O F D E N V E R