titillating tuesday - ode to breasts

Breasts

by Charles Simic

I love breasts, hard

Full breasts, guarded

By a button.

They come in the night.

The bestiaries of the ancients

Which include the unicorn

Have kept them out.

Pearly, like the east

An hour before sunrise,

Two ovens of the only

Philosopher's stone

Worth bothering about.

They bring on their nipples

Beads of inaudible sighs,

Vowels of delicious clarity

For the little red schoolhouse of our mouths.

Elsewhere, solitude

Makes another gloomy entry

In its ledger, misery

Borrows another cup of rice.

They draw nearer: Animal

Presence. In the barn

The milk shivers in the pail.

I like to come up to them

From underneath, like a kid

Who climbs on a chair

To reach the forbidden jam.

Gently, with my lips,

Loosen the button.

Have them slip into my hands

Like two freshly poured beer-mugs.

I spit on fools who fail to include

Breasts in their metaphysics

Star-gazers who have not enumerated them

Among the moons of the earth ...

They give each finger

Its true shape, its joy:

Virgin soap, foam

On which our hands are cleansed.

And how the tongue honors

These two sour buns,

For the tongue is a feather

Dipped in egg-yolk.

I insist that a girl

Stripped to the waist

Is the first and last miracle,

That the old janitor on his deathbed

Who demands to see the breasts of his wife

For the one last time

Is the greatest poet who ever lived.

O my sweet, my wistful bagpipes.

Look, everyone is asleep on the earth.

Now, in the absolute immobility

Of time, drawing the waist

Of the one I love to mine,

I will tip each breast

Like a dark heavy grape

Into the hive

Of my drowsy mouth.