The Biscuit Joint: Poems

Breathless

41 BREATHLESS Film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1960, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg; also song recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis, 1958 Jean-Paul Belmondo, I’m thinking of you tonight because I saw you walking down the Boulevard St. Germain just this afternoon with a young woman, and not a starlet, either, but a nurse, and you were using a cane, yet you were as handsome as you were in all those movies you made thirty, forty, fifty years ago, or, if not handsome, beau-laid, as the French say, or handsome-ugly, as we all are in our way. My students don’t know who you are, but then I don’t really know who my students are or they me. Women love you because you neither gaze too long into the mirror of your own excellence nor deny your manifest charms, for our self-loathing may be so great as to become a kind of narcissism, as I see when I am still in my own land and out shopping one day and pondering the tall guy in the cargo shorts and black knee socks in the food co-op sighing as he shelves bags of Garden of Eatin’ Black Bean Tortilla Chips while his shorter and more stylishly attired friend is saying, “I just didn’t want you to be the laughingstock of Tallahassee,” and the cargo shorts guy sighs again and puts out more bags of tortilla chips and says, “I’m afraid it’s too late for that,” and I think, now that’s giving your unworthy self a certain stature, isn’t it? To claim to be the biggest jackass in your town, even if it’s a small one like Tallahassee? Hee, haw! Look at me, everybody! A jackass and loving it. A month earlier, I had given a reading at Ohio University and was walking one evening along 42 the Ridges, the site of a deserted and terrible-looking mental hospital, a Gothic nightmare that, though empty, still breathed exhaustion and despair. The buildings looked like the mind itself: well-meaning but too heavy, and I was tired and had a plane to catch and saw in the distance a couple driving along slowly and possibly thinking, as I was, of the good intentions associated with this place, of the pain, and I wanted to ask them for a ride downhill, and I think they would have given me one gladly had they known I was an English professor, but I couldn’t see myself just then, and I didn’t know how I looked, and I don’t think they would have mistaken me for a mental patient—those had all been gone for years—but they might have taken me for an actor in a horror movie set on the grounds of a deserted mental hospital, maybe somebody who didn’t know when to stop acting. How do you know when to stop? In the movies, Jean-Paul, you were cool before “cool” came to mean “whatever,” as when one person says, “I can’t stand the sight of you anymore,” and the other person says, “That’s cool.” And you were “awesome” before that word was used mainly to describe pizza. You taught young men like me not to be cool but to try to be, and if it never worked, at least our efforts won us the young women who loved us for trying, who forgave us and let us think that they thought us awesome. Jean-Paul Belmondo, you leave me breathless. ...