An artist arch-backed to the room, she twists subtly.
Gaunt street lamps glint through the gauze of her hair
and her lips part to speak of holy babies crawling in the alleys.
She croons to them, offers herself each evening,
for evenings are the times of native american fairy tales
as much as days are built of eurasian fantasies.

She is the girl who danced naked for boys even before reaching puberty,
whose eyes led them farther even than her gentle fingers could,
beckoning to wind-tossed prairies moist with april’s yield;
yet she is supple only in the night,
for the day has caught her clutching at her pocketbook,
looking over her shoulder, doubting herself and her reservations.

She dreams and lights a candle,
and the candle is a coyote whose calls surround the city.
The ululations are stories of the earth mother and sky father,
of the happy turtle carrying the universe on its worn shell;
but they are tricks, she finds,
waking to the crash of Paul Bunyon striding onto Wiltshire Boulevard,
and the blue sky is the blue eyes of his babe dumb-faced over an empty land.

She would stop Johnny Appleseed in his tracks even now,
but she is an artist and impales herself upon him,
taking him deeply so that the urgency of her body transforms his seeds
and their steel skeletons twist and groan in the wind as they grow.