Reviewing the trashy, lightweight *masterpiece* Hellraisers (about the assorted misadventures of Oliver Reed, Richard Burton, Richard Harris, and Peter O’Toole), one passage stood out and I’ve invoked it often: “A personal favorite comes from the immortal Richard Burton writing about the immortal Liz Taylor. “Apocalyptic,” was how he described her breasts. “They would topple empires before they withered.” That’s not even a sex scene, and Burton was, of course, an actor, but there are novelists whose collected works don’t contain a line that perfect.”
Thinking about that line, that declaration of love/lust, and how often writers fail to accurately or convincingly depict or celebrate such things, I somehow stumbled into a poem entitled “Liz Taylor’s Talents“, which concerns itself with such stuff. I’m thrilled to see it appear in Panoply Magazine, for their “Adam and Eve” issue. Thank you Mr. Burton, and of course, endless gratitude to the incomparable Liz Taylor.
Liz Taylor’s Talents
Apocalyptic, Richard Burton proclaimed.
They would topple empires, he insisted.
(And if that’s not poetry, you can take all
the silicone from every centerfold,
and sell it to every dissolute purveyor
of pulchritude, going all the way back
to Caesar, who knew a thing or two
about excess—and how to supervise
a spectacle or oversee the final cut.)
Tits are not unlike talents: you’re born with them.
Of course, you can cultivate and refine and procure
all you want, Beauty’s still in the eye of the Beholder.
As such that lucky Dick immortalized
the archetype of an adoring gaze—as more than a handful
of prurient politicians or repressed priests
could ever fathom, with no quarter
or apology required for posterity.
Or especially what all those earnest but
wilted scribblers from a more Romantic Era
could convey, their sonnets smoldering
like moldy corsets in unread anthologies.
