berkeley women/farallon women

Berkeley women, with your lattes
And Tibetan panel coats
Silver hair plaited
Kneeling in your left-wing gardens
Strolling down your moneyed lanes
Bearing the political sins of all
the world like crosses on your
hand-woven shoulders
Plucking disdain fresh from the vine
To roast with garlic and organic thyme
And spill across
The sacred steps of Chez Panisse
Kneeling in the poetry gardens
Where even the sunflowers
with their giant heads lolling to
the left smile down on you

Farallon women, with your frosted
nails and frosted lips
Crawling down from the billboards
in Union Square
Towering, towering metropolitan
consumer machines slurping
oysters and peppered melon
under the tiled canopies and
light of hollow sea urchins
Fondant blue eyes, empty
Giant, lolling tongues and greedy fingers

2002