D-Cup Epiphanies

UPON JULIA'S BREASTS

by Robert Herrick

DISPLAY thy breasts, my Julia—there let me
Behold that circummortal purity,
Between whose glories there my lips I'll lay,
Ravish'd in that fair via lactea.


***

There is a tale from Hyperides retold by Carl Kerenyi in The Gods of the Greeks about the marriage of Poseidon and Thophanes, whose name is central and epiphantic, translated either as “she who appears as a goddess” or “she who causes a god to appear.” Both statements I think are mythically true, showing how mystery arises and arouses directly out of history, on the wave-crashings of desire.

Anyway, the story goes that her father King Bisaltes of Macedonia was a son of Helios and Gaia, a titanic legacy which delved the daugter Theophanes, so beautiful that suitors swarmed round her aura like intoxicated bees. Poseidon abducts her to an island in the middle of the sea whose name means “The Island of the Ram.” To hide from the suitors, Poseidon turns his bride into a sheep and himself into a ram; oh what the hell, one guesses his thought, as he then turns all the inhabitants of the island into sheep. (One ram, all that sheep, get it.) The suitors show up and find no trace of the god or goddess-seeming woman on the island and depart, allowing Poseidon to consummate his ram-marriage. From this union the ram with the golden fleece was born, a pelt which was later carried by Phrixos to Colchis, thus causing the great voyage of the Argonauts.

Beauty and booty, the sacred profane: who is that god of desire who rises from the waters, both the Venusian wonder of every curve to take a man’s breath away, and the shout of the exultant god arousing thus, wakened from nothing, flat waters and abyss.

That moment is both far and close; past and present phrenologies reveal a rich dappled surface prescient of and precipient to the divine, the rough surface of an orange unpeeling to naked fruit bursting with sweet juice, naughty nipples where there were qwerty keys on a computer keyboard, each letter & symbol a door to the imprurient and lacivious dark.


EPIPHANY

May 24

She appeared to me as a goddess,
she caused a god to appear
in the great profane night of my soul,
redeeming with desire. One look
across the room and my world
fell into water, jostling my fate
on huge waves as inevitable
of white shores as the way she
loved me a short while and
then drained out of every door.
Not much remains of that night
except recalling how, much later
yet still hours from first light,
she stared full into my eyes
with a cryptic soft smile
unbuttoning her blouse
and freeing her breasts from
a brassiere as if to slap me
awake with her pure
circummortal fire. Thus
the pretty stranger suddenly
changed into the utterly
ravishable bride, so fast
that wheeled eternities
spun something something
deep and wild free from
my history, jumping from those
tracks to another one
forever in and out a door
not grasped by mortal hands.
With an unwavering gaze
and half-shadowed smile
she revealed her secret
treasury to me, the epiphany
of a goddess waking a god
I didn’t know I ferried.
fleecing the night, the hour,
that random short bouree
a fleeting woman had with me
with a gold not found but is--
the myth, the mystery of
naked breasts which
tided me to a god’s isle
far at sea. There we found
ourselves naked amid
a choir of crashing waves,
anointed by Their highest
desire. The whole ruined
pantheon seemed alive
that singular night,
hallooing and crowing
and crowning our hot
loins where it seemed
the entire lost relation
was so juicily rejoined.

***

So yesterday, some 25 years later I’m at the imaging clinic with my wife on a Tuesday morning, taking a half day off from work so I can be there for the results of her mammogram -- there’s a cyst, questions about how it should be treated, whether the darker sorrows are colonizing there. A cloudy warm morning, several weeks before the start of the hurricane season, oppressive and humid with age and worry and history.

Oddly, next door to the facility is the Harem Room, formerly called the Booby Trap, a topless bar with very obvious architecture, two round domes for a roof fonted by large cement nipples. Back all those years into my lost voyagings on the black sea of desire I’d stopped into the Trap, drinking six-dollar beers and sitting dazed and bleary next to the stage where Daphnes and Chloes and Porches shook breasts whose nipples had been covered, according to the law, with Band-Aids. Trap of desire, indeed -- sitting there with all the other connectionless losers, rednecks with baseball caps slung low over their eyes, greasy accountants with loosened ties, husbands and lovers for whom simply looking at nakedness from the belly of the whale sufficed. We all believed something great and luminous was there, enough to risk the humiliation of being there, the risk of getting a DUI or a loved one finding out about all the secrets stashed in the closet of one’s hidden desires -- Call it a chapel of sorts, albeit cheap and beer-washed and attended by a bunch of bored buck-hungry young women for whom everything else had been stripped away already: Holy and dread, just like the old tales ...

Anyway, the waiting room is packed with nervous women of various ages, a high TV babbling the cycle of cable news for the two hours I sit there, Barry Bonds blah blah bear breaks into Colorodo house blah blah Enron jury deliberations continue blah blah bombs kills 40 in Bagdhad blah blah blah. I’m reading an Umberto Eco novel somewhat blearily, half asleep, lulled by the drone of dread and news into a fraught sort of half-sleeping. I doze off the end of a sentence and dream that behind the closed doors of this ward women fit their breasts into a plastic safe like we use for our butcher knife, a booby trap of medical certainty. How could so much fructiveness and wonder also font such horrors? When my wife emerges she’s smiling though somewhat pale -- nothing to worry about that cyst, the radiologist confirms, though she will have to come back to have it drained, though the blood test may still show something, though she will have to come back next year, though she will always have good reason for worry due to those breasts I have always found such delight in cupping while she slept, as if to curl my hands around the infinite itself.

Maybe Venus is more naked than ever -- to terribly revealed and revered for our own good -- but a culture besotted on D-cup-sized creamery thus calibrates its thirst to divine magnitudes. The goddess of the wave may have vanished, but not ever her epiphany. Girls, I don’t know if you’ve ever had your breath taken away with the sight of your lover naked -- maybe all that’s mere interface for more substantial nutrients within -- but if eyes could portion eternity, they do it one glance. Never mind the consequence, the ruin, the failing of both sight and what it beholds: that’s the power of the mythic image, a bulb with wattage that cannot go dark.




OLD IRISH LOVE POEM

O God, that I and my love
of the smooth white breast were together.
And none awake in the land of Ireland,
Men and women deep in sleep
While my love and I make play!
O fair-hued and loveliest of women,
O guiding star of my destiny,
I shall never believe from priest or brother
That there is sin in making love ...
... Never will death come near us,
In the middle of the fragrant wood.

— O Tuama, an Irish love poet,
from “An Gra in Amhrain,”
transl. Prosinias Mac Cana


***

She comes not (now)
She comes not when Noon is on the roses —
... Too bright is the day.
She comes not to the Soul til it reposes
... From work and play.
But when Night is on the hills, and the great Voices
... Roll in from Sea,
By starlight and by candlelight and dreamlight
... She comes to me.

— Herbert Trench, “She Comes Not When Noon is On The Roses”



… Do not dare to name them! Half-gods
hardly are allowed in our dark mouths ...
And, even full of insistence, the soul
knows only this amorphous Angel
who, bit by bit, erects himself on the edge
of our sufferings: bright, fatal and forceful,
never flinching, never afraid of heights,
but for all that, himself the vassal-being
of an unknown and sovereign contract.
Him, Captial, vertical letter
of the word that, slowly, we demolish;
brass boundary of our native life,
anonymous measure of those mountains
forming a chain in our heart,
in its abrupt and savage part ...
Harbor statue, landing beacon,
and yet, contemptuous shipwrecks!
... But inside you, a the very depths of you,
what a cemetery! So many Gods acquitted,
dismissed, forgotten, out of use,
so many prophets, so many wise men,
abandoned by your mad desire!

— from Rilke’s “But It Is Purer To Die,” transl. A. Poulin Jr.




KIMBERLEY BLUE

She is a blue stream
winding through
the smoke and booze
long brown hair
and blue blue eyes
the high tide of her body
straining against
the shore of her dress
blue spandex sparkling
like morning water
in this jaded light

She stops before me
with all night behind
all winter outside
all broken hearted
somehow eclipsed
a black aura in
this sapphire’s halo
she smiles on me
sweetly & asks
would you like a dance
and I say sure

She lifts her dress
lays it on my lap
reaches behind
to unleash blue lace
and begins to
wave and weave her body
round rich jazz

I inhale her deeply
a musk of jasmine and orchid
and I am only here
in this brilliant shadow
captive to blue billows
dreaming in my balls

Something too strong
for words not a wave
but more than a sigh
washes out of me and
climbs the salmon run
of her dance
Up knees up thighs
to hips whispering
whiskey saxophones and lace
Up smooth belly
to breasts so proud
they startle me
even here
even at such a naked price

When my eyes
rise all the way
I find her
watching me
watching her
for one two three beats
and we’re in some other room
too foolish to question
too swollen to ignore
too soon swept away

She smiles and looks
off into the mirror
to admire my lust
glowing on her skin
and devotes her motions
to a deeper blue

and that is that

Around the bar
other women repeat
this dance for other men
each pair a room where
a man tries to drink
deeper than a woman goes
and the night
is an empty glass
on any beach
where just one sip
would surely drown us all





CROSS BETWEEN
A WOMAN’S BREASTS”

Bright martyr,
you’re perfect
hanging there,
fusing me
to this song.

Grace note at
the center of
a dark pond.

Gold cup
brimming my gaze.

Compass
of insurrection
and grief.

Hammer for
a distant gong.

Nails at nether
and nadir
of this surf.

Ferryboat
and sherpa.

Crossroads
altar to making
and slaking.

You’re the bright aria
of the woman
I’ll never know
sitting across from
me in every room,

blessing my day
with one glint
of paradise.

Thank you, Lord,
for hanging
me here.


STUDIOLI

Dec. 2004

My study’s housed upon
the back of Brendan’s
whale, mid-sea of
all you turned salt blue
when you smiled and
disappeared from view.
Here are vaulted all
the beds and boats a
and books I found
the ghost of a warm
bleam of you in
these cold and rainy nights
when the world seemed
doomed to drown.
Your proffered breasts
upturns the bottom
of the sea and milks
its old lactissima,
a white smile so
sweet and warm
and frothy as to
smash every coast
and cape in ecstasy.
Guitar and pen
are my harpoons,
polished to a gleam
and displayed in thick
blue plush, fabled nibs
for hauling in those
finny angels whose
names I sing in
these matins of all seas.
Here are the three
rude cups you bid me
drink, poured to dregs
the swelter tonnage
of abyss; and here’s
the ravaged saddle of
the wave-maned horse
which is your
palanquin and my
writing chair.
Here is the spout-hole
of the whale which is
my darkling reach
to all the books cast
to the wave, a well
which spumes the exalt
psalms of every poet
since Taleissin to look
at you and sing. Here
is the heart of my fancy,
my outre madman’s
gaming room; ,my half
acre of black blubber
bathed by darkupswellings
of deep gloom; my chapel
of Iseult of the White
Hands who weaves my tears
each night upon her
dream-pale loom. Here
is the chambered
study study where
each artefact your
womb produced is
vaulted and revered,
the sum of every ache
and swoon I ever
felt for you, every
wave that ever found
a shore, every kiss
that turned the world
the wildest windy blue.

that his thirst may thus stay sealed.