The Breast

 This is the key to it.

This is the key to everything.

Preciously.


I am worse than the gamekeeper's children
picking for dust and bread.

Here I am drumming up perfume.


Let me go down on your carpet,
your straw mattress -- whatever's at hand
because the child in me is dying, dying.


It is not that I am cattle to be eaten.

It is not that I am some sort of street.

But your hands found me like an architect.


Jugful of milk! It was yours years ago
when I lived in the valley of my bones,
bones dumb in the swamp.
 Little playthings.


A xylophone maybe with skin
stretched over it awkwardly.

Only later did it become something real.


Later I measured my size against movie stars.

I didn't measure up.
 Something between
my shoulders was there.
 But never enough.


Sure, there was a meadow,
but no yound men singing the truth.

Nothing to tell truth by.


Ignorant of men I lay next to my sisters
and rising out of the ashes I cried
my sex will be transfixed!

Now I am your mother, your daughter, your brand new thing -- a snail, a nest.

I am alive when your fingers are.


I wear silk -- the cover to uncover --
because silk is what I want you to think of.

But I dislike the cloth.
 It is too stern.


So tell me anything but track me like a climber
for here is the eye, here is the jewel,
here is the excitement the nipple learns.


I am unbalanced -- but I am not mad with snow.

I am mad the way young girls are mad,
with an offering, an offering.
.
.


I burn the way money burns.

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