Rituals but not prayers.

American Beauty
For Ann London

As you described your mastectomy in calm detail
and bared your chest so I might see
the puckered scar,
"They took a hatchet to your breast!" I said. "What an
Amazon you are."

When we were girls we climbed Mt. Tamalpais
chewing bay leaves we had plucked
along the way;
we got high all right, from animal pleasure in each other,
shouting to the sky.

On your houseboat we tried to ignore the impossible guy
you had married to enrage your family,
a typical ploy.
We were great fools let loose in the No Name bar
on Sausalito's bay.

In San Francisco we'd perch on a waterfront pier
chewing sourdough and cheese, swilling champagne,
kicking our heels;
crooning lewd songs, hooting like seagulls,
we bayed with the seals.

Then you married someone in Mexico,
broke up in two weeks, didn't bother to divorce,
claimed it didn't count.
You dumped number three, fled to Albany
to become a pedant.

Averse to domesticity, you read for your Ph.D.
Your four-year-old looked like a miniature
John Lennon.
You fed him peanut butter from your jar and raised him
on Beowulf and Grendal.

Much later in New York we reunited;
in an elevator at Sak's a woman asked for
your autograph.
You glowed like a star, like Anouk Aimee
at forty, close enough.

Your pedantry found its place in the Women's Movement.
You rose fast, seen suddenly as the morning star;
wrote the ERA
found the right man at last, a sensitive artist;
flying too high

not to crash. When the cancer caught you
you went on talk shows to say you had no fear
or faith.
In Baltimore we joked on your bed as you turned into
a witty wraith.

When you died I cleaned out your bureau drawers:
your usual disorder; an assortment of gorgeous wigs
and prosthetic breasts
tossed in garbage bags, to spare your gentle spouse.
Then the bequests

you had made to every friend you had!
For each of us a necklace or a ring.
A snapshot for me:
We two, barefoot in chiffon, laughing amid blossoms
your last wedding day.

-- Carolyn Kizer

For posterity - David Byrne show setlist

Glass Concrete & Stone
I Zimbra
Ausencia
Finite
She Only Sleeps
The Other Side of this Life
The Great Intoxication
Naive Melody-This Must Be
Road to Nowhere
Nothing But Flowers
Once in a Lifetime
Un Di Felice
Tiny Appocalypse
Psycho Killer
U.B. Jesus
Dialog Box
What a Day that was
Blind

1st Encore:
Desconocido Soy
Life During Wartime

2nd:
And She Was

Akaky thought and thought and then he decided that he would have to cut down his ordinary expenses for a year at least: do without a cup of tea in the evenings; stop burning candles in the evening and, if he had some work to do, go to his landlady's room and work by the light of her candle; when walking down the street, try to walk as lightly as possible on the cobblestones and flagstones, almost on tiptoe, so as not to wear out the soles of his boots too soon; give his washing to the laundress as seldom as possible, and to make sure that it did not wear out, to take it off as soon as he returned home and wear only his dressing-gown of twilled cotton cloth, a very old garment that time itself had spared.


"Man cannot serve two masters," she said. Of real estate and lending institutions I have not slept. In that bed for days but instead have read much. And dictated beginnings, alternate turns in Goebbels and Gogol (who covers me in his Overcoat).


We seem, however, to have completely forgotten a certain Very Important Person who, as a matter of fact, was the real cause of the fantastic turn this otherwise perfectly true story has taken.

from "Contradictions: Tracking Poems"

Adrienne Rich



6.



Dear Adrienne:

                      I'm calling you up tonight

as I might call up a friend      as I might call up a ghost

to ask you what you intend to do

with the rest of your life. Sometimes you act

as if you have all the time there is. 

I worry about you when I see this.

The prime of life, old age

aren't what they used to be;

making a good death isn't either,

now you can walk around the corner of a wall

and see a light

that has already blown your past away.

Somewhere in Boston        beautiful literature

is being read around the clock

by writers      to signify

their dislike of this.

I hope you've got something in mind.

I hope you have some idea

about the rest of your life.

                               In sisterhood,

                                                 Adrienne