A Personal History and Mythology of Blue Jeans
In the old movies,
The women wore
Skirts and dresses.
Marilyn Monroe,
In “River of No Return”,
Had on tight blue jeans.
Mom wore dresses.
(Did women have legs,
Or were they
Like mermaids under there?
And why did they leave
a toilet full of blood, sometimes?)
In the mid ‘50s
She got some tight pants,
With green, vertical lines
And some kind of flower pattern.
She had legs, and an ass.
(toosie, she'd taught us to call it,
A word that sounds like a cushion.)
I felt embarrassed when she wore them.
Then she got a denim skirt.
“It looks like blue jeans! ”
Said my brother Fred.
It did, with stitched, white
Pockets on the rear.
I felt I’d die, that eyes,
My own included,
Would rivet on Mother’s ass.
Blue jeans were for boys.
(Our mythologies, they say,
Determine how we dress—
In this case, how our parents
Dressed us, after the War,
In cities and in suburbs,
Little cowboys everywhere,
Kicking soccer balls
And sliding slides,
Who’d never plowed a field
Or herded cows.
I fantasized of boys, back then,
For blue jeans x-rayed bodies
With their pockets
And their rivets
And their stitches.
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poem by Max Reif
Added by Poetry Lover
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