OK, this is called "You and the Breast."
OK, so I wrote this--
I was at an artist residency.
And when they showed me my room, they told me this is--
so this is where Philip Roth wrote his famous short story
"The Breast."
I was like, I never read that story.
[LAUGHTER]
And so I said, well, you know, I'm here to do other things.
[LAUGHTER]
So that is not my main concern.
But then by the second day, I'm looking
at this turret for hours and hours
because the turret is right above the desk.
And so I decided to read the story
and then proceeded to spend half of my time
at this artist residency writing this poem.
[CHUCKLING]
It's called "You and the Breast."
By now you know the story--
an English professor awakens to find, like Kafka's Gregor,
that he has turned into something unthinkable,
something so unlike who he was.
In his case not a beetle but a breast.
Young, perfectly round, its nipple erect.
What if he had found himself instead a breast at ease
in middle age, the nipple sure of its opinion
but not in constant need to give it?
[LAUGHTER]
In this room with a turret, where the story was written,
you are not turned on, but troubled by the memory
of your mother in her last years pushed around
in a wheelchair entirely braless.
Did it feel like freedom or resignation
to no longer have to roust the girls up and about,
or make them unwilling interlocutors?
You think for the nursing home this was mainly convenience.
With so much to do, why harness old women who've
wandered off a darkened stage?
Your mother who never answered the door without a girdle,
much less a bra.
What if the breast had been delicate and shallow,
a bead of water trembling on the petal of a thirsty cactus?
Flat as a mesa, scarred like an arroyo?
Or why not two breasts, one a full cup larger
than the other from having nursed
too long in the same position while writing
recommendation letters?
You lean back in your chair and stare
at the ceiling above the desk, its concentric circles
punctuated in the middle by a round light fixture that
teardrops into a nipple, and around the nipple
a ragged areola of insects drawn nightly to its luminous glands.
One understands when entering a room that others
have been there before you.
But this room is never just itself.
It is always a story that hovers over your own.
What if the nipple had sprouted a hair
and, given the professor's lack of hands, remained forever
unplucked?
What if the nipple had been inverted and not,
as the story goes, phallic?
A breast leaking milk, its infected ducts
hard and throbbing under a cabbage leaf?
The domed ceiling has two cracks like veins under pale skin.
On the roof, where the pointed end of the turret lives,
is another breast whose nipple pulls energy
from the center of the desk to its weathervane.
It's hard to get a signal beneath it.
You have to sit on the bed to text
a friend whose father died yesterday.
I didn't get a chance to say goodbye, she writes.
And, fuck capitalism.
Perfectly framed by the window to your left
is a long thin tree among a thicket.
It pushes proudly from its trunk what
looks like a breast, because now everything does, but is
actually a scar over a wound called
a burl, the result of some type of stress--
injury, virus, fungus.
Valued for its beauty, this type of scar
is often poached, destroying the tree it was trying to protect.
A Redwood can sprout another Redwood from its burl
if it thinks it might die.
The women in your family, their breasts at any age fall
sideward.
They never point to future, or sky,
but each, after sex, are waterfalls into canyons.