A week before surgery, I practiced my body.
This has kind of a lengthy gloss for a short poem.
So I read there's a wonderful poet
whose name is Tomaz Salamun.
And he is a very lively and eclectic poet
with this incredible vocabulary.
It's like words that you've heard in every corner
of the world come raining down.
And I love him.
And he once said in one of his poems that the painter Giotto,
he used his sketches of sheep in order
to make his paintings of angels.
I've looked at a lot of Giotto's paintings subsequently.
I haven't seen anything very sheepy or sheepish
about the Angels.
But he told me so.
I'm telling you.
It's a poetry fact.
Do with that what you will.
[CHUCKLES]
Secondly, Jonah.
You may be familiar with his story from the Old Testament.
So Jonah was a prophet.
And his job was to tell people that God was the one.
But he did not like the gig.
It was kind of dark.
If you want more information, you can read the Old Testament.
But basically, when he decided he
wanted to run away from the circus, he was on a boat
and there came a storm.
And he fell off the boat and he was swallowed by the whale.
And while he was in there, he had a change of heart.
And so happy ending to the story.
The whale vomited him up on the shore.
So there you go.
Apparently-- did you guys read this?
It was like maybe five or six years ago.
There was a man who claimed that he was actually
swallowed by a whale also.
So it's a thing.
It happens.
And finally, if you're ever walking down the beach
and you come across this sort of grayish, yellowish lump,
it doesn't look like much, but it smells absolutely ambrosial.
Give me a call.
What you've just found is ambergris,
and it is one of the rarest and most precious ingredients
in perfumery.
It also happens to be--
And this is not a poetry fact, this
is a bankable, real fact fact--
It also happens to be whale vomit.
A week before surgery, I practice my body.
Like Giotto's angels sketched from his studies of sheep.
I open the jaws of my back to the sky,
eating my body deeper into this blue.
Like Jonah vomited from the whale, fragrant as ambergris,
or plain as any woman who, a week before
mastectomy, practices being opened.