A prepuberty owl with popcorn Saturday afternoons I focused my glasses on Jane Russell's D cup in the dark believing in the inevitability of big breasts my constitutional right to deep cleavage that nature and nationality would provide. But at sixteen my coming-of-age was a pair of custard cups which my mother packed carefully in cotton as though they were a set of incubating eggs and I nested them in my bra praying to Jane to Marilyn to all the cinema saints. At twenty I gave up screened goddesses threw out the wadding envied every woman who could plump pillows over the top of her bra and took to Chinese necklines, slit skirts - I started legging it through life: But with forty closing in I retain the trauma of the mammary fantasies of the American male. A pioneer in my Conestoga wagon of womanhood I search for a man who, gratified at some quenching birthright bosom, delights in dumplings at the feast. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...OLNEY HYMNS: 18. LOVEST THOU ME? by WILLIAM COWPER IN THE VALLEY OF THE ELWY by GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS A ROUGH RHYME ON A ROUGH MATTER; THE ENGLISH GAME LAWS by CHARLES KINGSLEY THE BARTHOLDI STATUE by JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER THE MORAL FABLES: THE SWALLOW, AND THE OTHER BIRDS by AESOP THE BUTTERFLY by MARGARET AVISON |