Sometimes a poem experiences a case of ‘life imitating art.’ A few months after writing the narrative poem below I discovered that a friend of a friend actually flew from Paris to Bogota, Columbia to get a breast augmentation surgery. It only goes to show you that any vanity (or quest for a bodily aesthetic) imagined can and probably will be played out in the real world somewhere. . .  

 

Baby Blues

 

She didn’t like the color of her eyes.

Brown was just so damned common

where she came from.

When she traveled abroad

she would hide her eyes behind

blue contact lenses.

 

She made a much to do about her baby blues.

Whenever she glanced into the mirror

she imagined herself a princess

with diamond earrings,

and her pair of baby blues

sparkling like that

baby blue star sapphire

in the Smithsonian.

 

London Gatwick

rolled out the red carpet:

Was it her imagination

or was security more interested

in her baby blues

than checking her luggage

for bombs?

Her cabbie kept looking back at her

in the rear view mirror.

He couldn’t be checking out

her pint-sized breasts

in a push-up bra!

It had to be her baby blues,

the treasure sought after by

Persian cabbies in exile.

 

The Savoy Hotel put her up in

Monet’s suite overlooking the Thames.

The artist had painted more than

seventy paintings in this space.

But when she looked down onto the river

there was only the scant reflection

of her unembellished baby blues,

suspended above the lazy gait

of a chockablock barge.

She had the concierge personally draw

the curtains shut

And in the span of just one hour

she had a small mirror suspended from the ceiling

on a dole of fishing line

positioned above at arm’s length

for the pleasure of

the pillow-adorned headmistress.

Come night’s end

she would count her blinks

like jumping sheep

until her baby blues were veiled

in sleep.

 

Her train companion to Paris

was a brash Australian man

with an ugly accent.

He was crude and unlearned,

the only form of man that could

be cut loose in the Outback

and return to Sydney five years

later a millionaire.

She endured his presence

as they parted the uninspiring awe

that was the French countryside

from Calais-Frethun to Gare du Nord.

The man settled in for a nap.

He had got the hint that she was

not interested in his stories

nor his simpleton jokes.

He had one final comment for her:

“You know, you’ve got small tits

but yer baby blues make up for it, Sheila.”

 

With her plans in Europe concluded

she was not ready to return home.

There was a high-class clinic in Bogotá

that specialized in breast augmentation.

Her crown jewels,

her baby blues,

would no longer be an excuse

for excusing the rest of her.

 

By Craig Boehman, from Wolf Gin Sonnets, 2009