Breathless

Breathless

David Kirby

                    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（小星星）, 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（沉思，考虑） 

                    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（玉米粉圆饼） 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（身高，身材）, 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 

                    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.