that yield no meaning.
Children lisp it, and so do old men all alone
under the covers with their thumbs.
And questioned now, your skin shrinks away from the test:
modesty, which in the darkness (when company was gone)
was not cast off.
Someone is called Dr. Affectionate
and he still lives in forbidden concealment.
Exact science classifies what's missing
as caress units,
for which thus far
no substitute has been found.
Fed
My mother's breasts were large and white.
Snuggle up to her tits.
Make the most of them before they give way to bottle and
pacifier. Threaten with stuttering and complexes if they should be withheld. Don't just whine.
Let the milk include clear beef broth
or cloudy soup of codfish heads boiled
till blinded eyes roll
approximately in the direction of happiness.
Men don't give suck.
Men squint homeward when cows
with heavy udders cross
the road, blocking the traffic.
Men dream of the third breast.
Men envy the suckling babe
and always miss something.
Our bearded breastlings who provide for us with their tax payments smack their lips between appointments and comfort themselves with cigarettes.
After forty men should start being suckled again publicly and for a fee
until they are sated and wishless and stop crying, stop having to cry in the John — all alone.
The wurzel mother
And then the third breast disappeared. I don't know the details — I wasn't around just then, I think it was after the hundred and eleventh generation of Awas. Anyway, Ilsebill, it was gone. It doesn't seem to have wasted slowly away; rather, one day it was just suddenly missing. No, not because the women were sick of suckling us, but because the Flounder wanted to be God to us Edeks!
"Typical!" you say. But at that time there was a growing need for compensation, for a bit of male divinity. We didn't want the Flounder to be the only god, just an associate god. And at some time or other, one of the still three-breasted priestesses of Awa, besieged with petitions by us men, consented: she lay with the Flounder in the rushes, or on a bed of leaves, or on a compromise bed of rushes and leaves, and came back the next day without a middle breast.
Or was it entirely different? Because nothing was happening, we Edeks thought we'd have a little fun and give the women a bit of a scare, just as I recently gave you a bit of a shock. "Oh! Something slippery-slimy! Eek!" you screamed and kicked the covers off: arm-long, in coiling beauty, it lay between us on the sheet. Irresponsible of me, I admit. Now that you're pregnant, the Lord knows what that eel in the bed might have done.
Then, during the hundred and eleventh generation of Awas, I secretly molded clay into a life-sized man, with an extra penis growing out of each buttock, so he could have pleasured three Awas at once. One moonless night we stationed this monstrosity outside the women's lodge. And the next morning (seen through sleepy eyes) my super-Edek was taken for real. In any case the women, some of whom were pregnant, screamed; but miscarriages were not the only consequence. Or did some other, comparable shock make the third breast fall off like a wart? It simply disappeared. High time.
Or it was something else again. The decisive step came
much later. Even Wigga still had the third breast Pomorshian men required. We had scarcely modified our needs. Why should we have? (We were damn well off.) But when Wigga, in a series of major campaigns, had the so-called dream wurzel, a very special multipurpose root, exterminated as a public enemy, when she deprived us of the wishing weed, the plug we had chewed for thousands of years, which brightened our dreams, assuaged our fears, and appeased our yearnings, we no longer knew exactly what we desired.
The film of our vivid imagining broke off. We lost our innocence. Gone was the third breast. No longer palpable because no longer dreamed. Unsuckled, we reached into the void from that day on. Dull reality had made us poor. Believe me, Ilsebill, it was sad, though having ceased to wish (because we had ceased to dream), we could no longer realize what we had lost.
After that we grew restless. Dissatisfaction set in. Later (up to Sophie's time) we compensated for our loss by chewing fly agaric-not to mention various substances that today are kiffed and hashed, steeped with tea, or shot into the veins. But nothing could or can equal our (exterminated) wishing wurzel.
And addressing the Women's Tribunal, the Flounder, who had never heard of our primordial drug, said: "Well, ladies, that's the way it was, the three-breasts hoax was finally exploded-during Wigga's Iron Age, to be exact. At last the men developed a sense of reality, and the fiction of the triune primal mother went up in smoke. All at once-demystified by what lightning flash we do not know — good old Wigga was standing there with two plain, ordinary tits. It may have been the ensuing disenchantment that led a few Pomorshian men to experiment with the migrations. Nothing unusual. Dreams of primal mothers had faded long before in other places. True, the Cretan goddess Hera, famous in her day as the best of Minoan earth mothers, had not abdicated, but she had been forced to marry-yes, marry! — the god Zeus, and to share her hegemony. I myself was obliged to take on the function of god for a time, in order to compensate just a little for the power of the primal mothers, who despite the lost breast went right on tyrannizing men with their loving care. I was under pressure. Despite my failures, my millennial efforts in the male cause had not been forgotten. Through a division of labor, I was put in charge of everything connected with oceans, rivers, and fishing. My role was comparable to that of Poseidon in relation to the Pelasgian Athene — I was expected to assert myself alongside the Awa cult, which continued to linger on. Naturally conflicts were inevitable — in Athens and elsewhere. As you can imagine, ladies, the replacement of mother right by the rational though in a sense fictitious father right resulted in several counterrevolutions. Need I remind you of the Bacchantes, Amazons, Erinyes, Maenads, Sirens, and Medusas? The battle of the sexes in ancient Greece was rough, really rough. By comparison nothing much happened on the banks of the Vistula. Apart from the sudden disappearance of the third breast, there is little to report. No material for tragedies, though at that very time the restless Goths were taking a rest in the region of the Vistula estuary, for, eager as they were to perform heroic feats, they couldn't make up their minds whether to return northward or to pursue their southward course. Among the Pomorshians, timeless matriarchy continued, though somewhat mitigated by me, the associate fish god. Even three-breastedness lived on, in small ceramic artifacts. No question of a new era, or at the most this: beginning with Wigga, root plants were grown for food. She was a true wurzel mother; she even looked like a mangel-wurzel."
With Wigga farming became drudgery. As long as one of the long line of Awas dealt out loving care, there was a limit to the amount of barley, spelt, and oats grown, we retained our independence as fishermen and hunters; most of our time was spent beyond hailing distance in the reeds or underbrush, on moors or remote beaches, and though oppressed we were able to enjoy life. It was Wigga who first harnessed us to wooden plows and sent us out to the beet fields. We had to gather the seeds of wild root plants, for in her garden-sized experimental field Wigga sowed rows of charlock and mangel (Beta vulgaris), bred the precursors of the radish, or salsify, and of the beets with which at a much later date Amanda Woyke cooked beet and dill soup for the farm hands of the Royal Prussian State Farm at Zuckau. On