The Zones of Paradise

HOMAGE

HOMAGE Breasts love winter— they joyride in jalopy bras, forget themselves in sweatshirts, mumble their long or short vowels into layers of wool and fleece. But just as damned and elect differently await the reckoning, some dread, some long for summer— for summer judges bosoms, boobs, jugs, knockers, tits, and makes revelation commonplace. At the marina swimming pool, a teenager glides past with her new apparatus, two great spinnakers leading the languid yacht of her body, skinny girls wait at the diving board with their first inklings nudging the spandex, a prim wife backstrokes in rigid pastel, divorcées, lax in skimpy black, share their cigarette-rough laughs, and a large woman lumbers to the pool’s edge and lowers her flowered suit strategically into the turquoise, up to a smother of breasts bobbing like lifeboats before the Mayday, Mayday of her body.  Every tiny assertion, each stiff insistence, every overzealous nod is aware of the eyes of men: powerboaters lounging with their Budweisers in a cold sweat, graying skippers glancing up from Patrick O’Brian over half-moon spectacles, and twelve-year-old-boys with snorkels and masks going down for reconnaissance into the chlorinated underworld. I bet there’s not a cup of milk together in those two breasts, sneered my own sixth grade nemesis— an assessment that defied the basics of biology but nonetheless unnerved my adolescence, till I finally unbuttoned and my first lover murmured More than a mouthful is wasted as he sweetly illustrated his point of view. Twenty years later in this poolside shade, my baby agrees: his pink cry the shape of my stretched nipple, his eyes and fist and tongue ravenous and grappling with what has made him live.  ...