Selected for Immortal Muse by Zireaux (read Zireaux’s comments on this poem)
Pink T-Shirt
he liked to arrive at her door
ring the bell and wait
to see her face above him at the window
the eyes widen, the mouth an oh!
look through the keyhole
to see the joy of her
running down the stairs in a pink t-shirt
cupping each large unruly breast
not enough hands
to stop the smile on her face
New Zealand. A small-breasted country?
Zireaux’s comments on this poem:
Not the chest, my racy reader, but the shapely work of Ms. Mary McCallum — one of our most observant and talented contemporary poets — allows us to continue our examination of the big-breasted theme we found in last Tuesday’s poem. Was it the movie, Godzilla, that first unloosed into the mass-market consciousness (and in so doing, performed a castration of sorts) that most vulgar and shortest of adianoetas: “Size matters”?
As in all art, alas, size matters in poetry, very much matters in poetry. But not in any implied largeness; not in any well-hung sense. “I see now how slight it is,” says McCallum of her “Pink T-Shirt,” but it’s exactly this slightness — the five two-line stanzas, the absence of any upper case letters, the single punctuation (“oh!”) — that allows those “unruly breasts” to bulge. Everything about this poem works. The “oh!” matches the keyhole (or keyh-oh!-l), matches the “o”s in “joy” and even in “stop.” The two-line stanzas mimic the breasts as they descend the stairs — unruly in their meter but cupped in their form. We start with “he liked” and end with “her face” and in the bifurcating doorway unlock the theories of mind (“look through the keyhole / to see the joy of her”) as he thrills at her delight over his arrival.
New Zealand, you might say, is a small-breasted country. Its artists (with several notable exceptions) generally prefer to find beauty in the miniature, the subtle, the understated and unassuming, while keeping their more exuberant assets well and truly cupped. Few poets are able to define the shapeliness of this beauty better than McCallum. Her only shortcomings, as far as I can tell, are too many New Zealand awards and an overdose of Manhire (the UV rays of Kiwi literature).
It’s interesting to note that Ms. McCallum does not appear in 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry, the latest compendium of the genus by Paula Green and Harry Ricketts — an impressive book about poetry, although New Zealand stays hidden in its night burrow. I’ve sworn to review the book, and surely I will (maybe I have), as soon as I find a pair of gloves thick enough to handle the flightless bird I so much admire but whose talons are known to inflict frightening wounds when feathers are ruffled. Perhaps McCallum’s absence from its pages confirms my suspicion: That any book about a national literature will always do its subject an injustice, as it tries to fit some standardized A-cups — or any bra for that matter — on what should be, what demands to be, an unfettered, an unruly, double-D art form.
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Thank you Zireaux for this utterly ‘oh!’ post. I can’t stop smiling – and not because my hands are engaged elsewhere – well, I guess they are, but in the mundane act of typing. How astonishing it is to find you inside this poem – at a flat on Chelsea Road London – looking through the keyhole – grinning. And to find you talking of my poems as having some cuppable weight!
You see I’ve only published very few poems ever – and all of those are back in the dark ages. The Tuesday Poem blog has helped kick me back into poetry and I am so grateful to the blog and my fellow Tuesday Poets for this.
And Bill … his influence has not been to shape but to hone (if that makes sense) and I am eternally grateful to him too.
Thanks again, Zireaux.
Impressive!