In the hot ivory light
of New Mexico
she clarified boundaries.

No clothes on the bed.
Don't flush liquid waste.
Be brilliant using Photoshop®.

We drove to the corrupt, beige village,
desert air precisely metered
through careful cracks,
to find the formal offspring
of her digitized imagination.

In pale adobe walls
of sham historic rooms
her graphics captured space
once held by desert colors
of Indian ceramics.
One tritone Storyteller stayed,
tucked in a corner,
its plump clay face
a wreath of smiles;
the open mouth above
his seven daughters
silent singing ancient
Anasazi tales.

And there above
tradition's form,
the artist's tightwound vision—
postmodern nets
of polychromic webs, with
woven overlays of flesh
and leaf and bone—
enchanted me.

Amazed at technographic flame,
I barely heard
her reasoned explications.

Later, assured
I had the proper gear,
she took me hiking.

And though she warned,
I slipped hot feet into
the thick sienna
of the Rio Grand,
smelling the summer
ocher of its birth.

In thrumming balance
with rules too tight
for Southwest heat,
we celebrated
Independence Day.

Then, in cool cobalt dusk
after dinner's washing up
she loosened.

Her pale, injured body
held wild children in the night.
They crawled within
her tautly muscled arms
and sucked her narrow breasts
as something feral sang
beyond the road.
With painted mouths they moaned
as midnight tongues
slid up the terra cotta scar
that mapped her dread
from knee to hip.

And when the moon
cut piñon pine
to fingered black
and drew a stormbird
on her open lips,
her wounds turned into
silver rivers
of release.