This poem is not a prose poem.
The poems that I've been reading up to now have been.
This is a poem in regular old lines,
as people usually write poems.
It's called "Breasts," and I think it's kind of based
on going to France and touring Pere Lachaise cemetery
and thinking of all the people buried there, Gertrude Stein,
Edith Piaf.
And in retrospect, I know now that Jim Morrison's
buried there.
And my daughter never forgave me for not visiting his grave,
but that's beside the point.
Back to the poem called "Breasts."
"If I were French, I'd write about breasts,
structuralist treatments of breasts,
deconstructionist breasts, Gertrude Stein's breasts
in Pere Lachaise under stately marble.
Film noir breasts no larger than olives,
Edith Piaf's breasts shadowed under a song, mad breasts raving
in the bird market on Sunday.
Tonguey breasts softening the landscape, the politics
of nipples, we're all equal.
A friend remembers nursing, his twin a menacing blur.
But wait, we're in America where breasts were pointy until 1968.
I once invented a Busby Berkeley musical with naked women
underwater sitting at a counter where David Bowie soda-jerked
them ice cream glaciers.
It sounds so sexual but had a platonic, airbrushed air.
Beckett calls them dugs, which makes me think of potatoes,
but who calls breasts potatoes?
Bolshoi dancers strapped down their breasts
while practicing at the bar.
You guess they're thinking of sailing,
but probably it's bread, dinner, and the Igor Zlolic
Show, their Phil Donahue.
There's a photo of me getting dressed
where I'm surprised by Paul and try to hide my breasts,
and another this year posed on a pier
with my breasts reflected in silver sunglasses.
I blame it on summer, when flowers overcome gardens
and breasts point at the stars.
Cats have eight of them.
And Colette tells of a cat nursing its young while being
nursed by its mother.
Imagine the scene rendered human.
And then there's the Russian story about the woman.
But wait, they've turned the lights down,
and Humphrey Bogart is staring at Lauren Bacall's breasts,
as if they might start speaking."