Elisavietta Artamonoff Ritchie Farnsworth, well-known and loved, prolific American writer, poet, teacher, editor, essayist, and translator passed away on January 13th, 2025 in Solomons, Maryland. You can read more of her obituary at Legacy on the Internet.
Lisa Ritchie was the collaborating poet who gave the name A Splendid Wake to Myra Sklarew's archival project that operated with a wiki supported by The George Washington University.
On June 28, 2025, a life celebration will be held for Lisa at her former farmhouse.
In this photograph taken in 1999, Karren Alenier (left) stands with Lisa Ritchie (right) on the occasion of Karren's book launch party (Looking for Divine Transportation) which Lisa hosted at her DC house on Macomb Street. Lisa's hospitality and generosity was well known in the Washington, DC area.
SORTING LAUNDRY
by Elisavietta Ritchie
Folding clothes,
I think of folding you
into my life.
Our king sized sheets
like table cloths
for the banquets of giants,
pillow cases, despite so many
washings seams still
holding our dreams.
Towels patterned orange and green,
flowered pink and lavender,
gaudy, bought on sale,
reserved, we said, for the beach,
refusing, even after years,
to bleach into respectability.
So many shirts and skirts and pants
recycling week after week, head over heels
recapitulating themselves.
All those wrinkles
to be smoothed, or else
ignored, they're in style.
Myriad uncoupled socks
which went paired into the foam
like those creatures in the ark.
And what's shrunk
is tough to discard
even for Goodwill.
In pockets, surprises:
forgotten matches,
lost screws clinking on enamel;
paper clips, whatever they held
between shiny jaws, now
dissolved or clogging the drain;
well washed dollars, legal tender
for all debts public and private,
intact despite agitation;
and, gleaming in the maelstrom,
one bright dime,
broken necklace of good gold
you brought from Kuwait,
the strangely tailored shirt
left by a former lover...
If you were to leave me,
if I were to fold
only my own clothes,
the convexes and concaves
of my blouses, panties, stockings, bras
turned upon themselves,
a mountain of unsorted wash
could not fill
the empty side of the bed.
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