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Poem	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.
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