OK.
This is like the seventh inning stretch,
because I'm going to read a long poem.
And I hope it keeps you interested.
But it will take a while to read, so, take a deep breath.
[LAUGHS]
"Poem for Women and for Men."
"Do you want to know the disadvantages"-- excuse me.
"Do you want to know the disadvantages of having sex
at my age?"
the old woman asked.
Flatulence, incontinence, and bruising.
Sex will make a fool of us from the end to the beginning.
At age 10 in the stacks of the library,
in the pages of a medical book of anatomical freeze,
I saw a teenage girl.
She was naked from the waist up, porcelain in a black and white
photograph, one arm raised in neither surrender nor salute,
and in the armpit, small, but fully formed,
like an overturned doll house teacup,
a perfectly shaped, perfectly rounded,
miniature human breast.
And for a while, afterwards, whenever a girl or woman
would raise her arm, I'd do the quick eye dance
for the third, the hidden, mysterious, rare, forbidden,
the one part nobody ever mentions.
When desire begins to merge with imagination, under the blanket,
you pump the silky skin madly.
Probably, no one told you how, or told you why,
with the full firm grip of a boy's fist,
from top to bottom and back up.
The rush of fluid passing over exquisite nerves
mixes with an irritating pain, as though you've
fallen off your sled and careened, scraped,
and bleeding, wild with exhilaration
down the snowy hill.
You don't yet know about the rounded sensitive rim,
the pacing, or the tenderness you're
supposed to show yourself as though you are another person.
And that other person is supposed to be a girl.
Every child's organ with its own biography.
Like a 12-year-old who unzipped my fly expertly
with one hand, plucked my penis from my underpants,
the way a man will arrange a book of matches with one hand,
fold the match forward to scratch it into flame.
Then slowly, idly, roughly with the smallest part
of her attention, while she chatted on the telephone,
jerked me off.
I was also 12 and frequently nudged
her, stroke, stroke until the white rope of marrow
would geyser up and over us.
Then, with a Kleenex, she wiped away the cum.
"She did what?"
That's Gail, with her commentary.
And of her girlfriend, she says, "At the cafe, a really intimate
conversation, the best of girl talk,
it had nothing to do with men, by the way.
Then a man slides over to our table, and what?"
She fluffs up her entire body like a cat in heat.
"She forgot I was even there."
And somewhere, between two cars locked
bumpers, a clever, angry woman saying calmly to an angry man,
"You can suck my cock."
Anger, indignation, competition, confusion, sometimes, beauty.
In the metro from Bastille to Opera,
an aged couple elegantly, shabbily
dressed, their skin so opaque, you
can see the jugulars flutter at their necks.
And their mouths, dry leaves whispering into each other,
kissing past station after station
with a certain passionate restraint.
We chased them, we turned away, amazed, turned back to watch.
All night of sleep, a woman I just met
held my penis sleeping in her hand.
Another night, a woman and I were
having this passionate conversation, half intellect,
half sexual tension, as though we've
known each other for years and picked up where we left off.
And I could feel the nightcrawler
stirring in my lap.
And then she said, "Isn't this great?
I can have a good talk with a man
and not worry that, at any moment,
he'll be trying to get into my pants?"
Separate creatures, every woman with a rationale, every man
has planned.
And political ideas changing the ways
we think, no room for nice ass anymore, or let me
carry that for you.
No rude jokes even with your wife.
And in the company of the young, no shy and honest public airing
of the struggle between men and women.
And in educated company, nobody even knows what to say anymore.
"When did romantic love began?"
asked the professor before she tells us all.
And the rooster wants to poke its head out
for a little gloat, rue, regret, shame.
She smelled so good, I was sure I could inhale her
with a single breath.
All women, the same woman, you write it in your notebook,
erase it, write "separate creatures."
After that, you write, "rue, regret, shame."
Do you know this?
Of course, but I hope it doesn't strike you often
that somewhere, a man, the husband of a friend,
and uncle in his dotage, some invisible stranger who saw you
on the street, your mind on groceries,
a man stands over a toilet, eyes closed and moving, he groans.
And further, further out, and even weirder,
a man is jerking off to the girl you were 30 years ago.
There he was, peeping into your cabana.
There you were, changing out of your old bathing suit
into your new pubescence.
And in the foggy mirror, the rosy orioles of nipples
rose to greet the cold.
And now, the man can't get the picture to leave his bed.
You prick, you bastard, you're all the same.
All you do is follow it around.
The elderly professor said, "I never chased women
when I was young.
Who had the time?
And wouldn't that mean all of them would become as objects?"
But the breast, every year, they drop another inch.
I still can't take my eyes off them.
"Are they sensitive?"
Gail shrugged.
"Can I touch them?"
She wouldn't let me.
We were looking for a place to put our blanket.
And to please me, she scanned the women on the beach.
This was neat, she was pregnant, her breasts
are already swollen.
So despite my protestations, she kept them covered.
And with the artist's quick eye, located
what she saw to be the most beautiful, most
various congregations, spread our blanket out, and began.
This pair that pair, the melons, the rockets, the wings
of angels lie on their backs.
And at a distance, two pretty teenage topless girls
at volleyball.
"You see?" she said, as though it were perfectly obvious,
"It's not the size.
It's the shape, the shapeliness, it's
the proportion to the body."
What does a man want?
Are we all the same?
And what to do about the elderly woman who
sat beside us at summer's ease, and beside her,
the granddaughter, both, unmindful of my stare,
both topless, serious as gamblers
at their game of cards?
The cute little girl as yet unburdened by a man's
inappropriate attention.
The woman's breast, unmindful after all these years,
were leathery and dark as emptied Spanish wine skins,
wrinkled as an old man's pair of slippers.
What would I have done for them?
"You're just a boy," Gail said.
All breasts are beautiful, I countered.
"She'll do it with anyone.
She doesn't care," my friend said.
We walked up 3 flights of stairs and rapped at Bunny's door.
"Shh, my mother's sleeping."
One stuffed chair, one standing lamp,
one dove overhead, she didn't say another word,
took off her blouse, and dungarees, her underpants,
unhooked her bra, the breasts released full,
and with the largest nipples I've ever seen--
sag, circles, dark as plum.
She knelt, put her mouth on me till I got hard,
pulled me down, pulled me into her, and we fucked.
So this was what it was.
My friend, on the stuffed chair, watching.
"At the door, kiss me," Bunny said.
At the dinner party, the guests were telling their shy stories,
their earliest, most revealing, worst, and best, and most
bizarre sexual experiences.
"How old were you?"
A woman asked me.
"13," silence.
"Jesus," the woman said, then, "Did you kiss her?"
And that remembered pick up in a bar 20 years ago
before disease gave its dire instructions.
Or your own wife, who is the same woman each time
but somehow different.
One night, you talk about it.
And she pulls it out of you.
"You think we're all the same?"
"Rue, regret," you write it in your notebook, then this,
"Harder, slower, I'm a grown up woman now."
In the medical book"-- it's almost over--
"in the medical book of anatomical freeze,
the girl with a breast in her armpit looked to be about 16.
I don't remember what she looked like, but she was smiling.
And I couldn't make out the meaning of the smile.
If still alive, she's old by now.
At best, she found a man who loved her,
a man with two hands, and one mouth.
But where to put this, even after all these years,
and in which order?"