WEBVTT

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This poem is not a prose poem.

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The poems that I've been
reading up to now have been.

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This is a poem in
regular old lines,

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as people usually write poems.

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It's called "Breasts," and
I think it's kind of based

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on going to France and
touring Pere Lachaise cemetery

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and thinking of all the people
buried there, Gertrude Stein,

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Edith Piaf.

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And in retrospect, I know
now that Jim Morrison's

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buried there.

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And my daughter never forgave
me for not visiting his grave,

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but that's beside the point.

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Back to the poem
called "Breasts."

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"If I were French, I'd
write about breasts,

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structuralist
treatments of breasts,

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deconstructionist breasts,
Gertrude Stein's breasts

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in Pere Lachaise
under stately marble.

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Film noir breasts no
larger than olives,

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Edith Piaf's breasts shadowed
under a song, mad breasts raving

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in the bird market on Sunday.

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Tonguey breasts softening
the landscape, the politics

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of nipples, we're all equal.

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A friend remembers nursing,
his twin a menacing blur.

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But wait, we're in America where
breasts were pointy until 1968.

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I once invented a Busby Berkeley
musical with naked women

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underwater sitting at a counter
where David Bowie soda-jerked

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them ice cream glaciers.

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It sounds so sexual but had
a platonic, airbrushed air.

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Beckett calls them dugs, which
makes me think of potatoes,

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but who calls breasts potatoes?

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Bolshoi dancers strapped
down their breasts

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while practicing at the bar.

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You guess they're
thinking of sailing,

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but probably it's bread,
dinner, and the Igor Zlolic

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Show, their Phil Donahue.

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There's a photo of
me getting dressed

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where I'm surprised by Paul
and try to hide my breasts,

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and another this
year posed on a pier

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with my breasts reflected
in silver sunglasses.

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I blame it on summer, when
flowers overcome gardens

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and breasts point at the stars.

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Cats have eight of them.

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And Colette tells of a cat
nursing its young while being

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nursed by its mother.

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Imagine the scene
rendered human.

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And then there's the Russian
story about the woman.

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But wait, they've
turned the lights down,

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and Humphrey Bogart is staring
at Lauren Bacall's breasts,

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as if they might
start speaking."

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