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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
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
excellence2 nor deny your manifest charms,
for our self-loathing may be so great as to become
a kind of narcissism3, as I see when I am
still in my own land and out shopping one day and pondering（沉思，考虑）
in the food co-op sighing as he shelves bags of Garden of Eatin'
Black Bean Tortilla Chips while his shorter
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
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
mental hospital, a Gothic nightmare that, though
empty, still breathed exhaustion10 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
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."
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.
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