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-year-

• old 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.

Fig. 1.

Ray Boynton. Folio: The Hart Press, Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1892 ed. Berkeley, California, 1940.

Postamble

I am the great-niece of California artist Ray Boynton. Although he played an important psychic role in my family’s life, I only met Boynton once in my childhood. Then, in 1975, diagnosed with breast cancer, believing I was going to die, I journeyed with my sister, Nancy Mae Maresh (d.), to Apache Junction, Arizona, where Beryl Wynnyk Boynton (d.), Boynton’s third wife, gave me the Boynton papers so I could, as my own last heart’s desire, “write a book” before I died. Well, I didn’t die—not yet. And for the last forty-some years, I have researched my great-uncle and his works, interviewed those who knew him, journeyed to view his murals, and wrestled with the idea and the reality of writing the book.

Ray Boynton has been called “a poet of the walls,” and the poetry part speaks to me. Sometimes I don’t want to write a biography of Ray S. Boynton. I neglect it, I avoid it, I cower before it. Yet, the poetry draws me onward: “The change onward from ours to that of beings who walk other spheres” (Walt Whitman, “The World Below the Brine”).