Authors: Erica Jong
The first time
I slept in your arms,
I knew I had come home.
Your body was a ship
& I rocked in it,
utterly safe in the breakers,
utterly sure of this love.
I fit into your arms
as a ship fits into water,
as a cactus roots in sand,
as the sun nestles into the blazing horizon.
The house sails all night.
Our dreams are the flags
of little ships,
your penis the mast
of one of the breeziest sailboats,
& my breasts floating,
half in & half out
of the water,
are like messages in bottles.
There is no point to this poem.
What the sea loses
always turns up again;
it is only a question of shores.
We used to strike sparks
off each other.
Our eyes would meet
or our hands,
& the blue lightning of love
would sear the air.
Now we are soft.
We loll
in the same sleepy bed,
skin of my skin,
hair of my head,
sweat of my sweat—
you are kin,
brother & mother
all in one,
husband, lover, muse & comforter;
I love you even better
without sparks.
We are pebbles in the tide
rolling against each other.
The surf crashes above us;
the irregular pulse
of the ocean drives our blood,
but we are growing smooth
against each other,
Are we living happily ever after?
What will happen
to my love of cataclysms?
My love of sparks & fire,
my love of ice?
Fellow pebble,
let us roll
against each other.
Perhaps the sparks are clearer
under water.
At the furthermost reach of the sea
where Atlantis sinks under the wake of the waves,
I have come to heal my life.
I knit together like a broken arm.
The salt fills in the crevices of bone.
The sea takes all the fragments of my lives
& grinds them home.
I wake up in a waterbed with you.
The sea is singing & my skin
sings against your skin.
The waves are all around us & within.
We sleep stuck to each other’s salt.
I am healing in your arms.
I am learning to write without the loss of love.
I am growing deeper lungs here by the sea.
The waves are knives; they glitter & cut clean.
This is the sea’s surgery.
This is the cutting & the healing both.
This is where bright sunlight warms the bone,
& fog erases us, then makes us whole.
After the first astounding rush,
after the weeks at the lake,
the crystal, the clouds, the water lapping the rocks,
the snow breaking under our boots like skin,
& the long mornings in bed…
After the tangos in the kitchen,
& our eyes fixed on each other at dinner,
as if we would eat with our lids,
as if we would swallow each other…
I find you still
here beside me in bed,
(while my pen scratches the pad
& your skin glows as you read)
& my whole life so mellowed & changed
that at times I cannot remember
the crimp in my heart that brought me to you,
the pain of a marriage like an old ache,
a husband like an arthritic knuckle.
Here, living with you,
love is still the only subject that matters.
I open to you like a flowering wound,
or a trough in the sea filled with dreaming fish,
or a steaming chasm of earth
split by a major quake.
You changed the topography.
Where valleys were,
there now are mountains.
Where deserts were,
there now are seas.
We rub each other,
but we do not wear away.
The sand gets finer
& our skins turn silk.
Goddess, I come to you
my neck wreathed with rosebuds,
my head filled with visions of infants,
my eyes open to your rays of illumination,
my palms open to your silver nails,
my vagina & my womb gaping
to be filled by your radiance…
O goddess, I would be a worthy vessel.
Impermanence—all is impermanence.
The cock rises to fall again;
the woman fills only to empty
in a convulsion that shakes the world;
the poet grows to become a voice
only to lose that voice when death takes her.
A stroke cancels her upon the page—
& yet I open her book & a chill wind blows from eternity.
Goddess, I come to you
wreathed in tears, in losses, in whistling winds.
I wrap the witch’s herbs around my neck
to ward off the impermanence that is our common fate.
The herbs dry & crumble,
as my face grows the map of my anxieties,
& my daughter leaps up like a vine
twining around the trellis of impermanence.
O goddess, teach me to praise loss,
death & the passing of all things—for from this flux
I know your blessings flow.
The extinct stars
look down
on the centuries
of the horned God.
From the dark recesses
of the Caverne
des Trois Frères
in Ariège,
to the horned Moses
of Michelangelo,
in Rome,
from the Bull of Minos
& his leaping dancers
poised on the horns
of the dilemma…
From Pan
laughing & fucking
& making light
of all devils,
to the Devil himself,
the Man in Black,
conjured by
the lusts of Christians…
From Osiris
of the upper &
lower kingdoms,
to the Minotaur of azure Crete
& his lost labyrinth…
From Cernunnos
to Satan—
God of dark desires—
what a decline
in horny Gods!
O for a goat to dance with!
O for a circle of witches
skyclad under the horned moon!
Outside my window
hunters are shooting deer.
Thus has your worship sunk.
O God with horns,
come back.
O unicorn in captivity,
come lead us out
of our willful darkness!
Come skewer the sun
with your pointed horns,
& make the cave,
the skull, the pelvic arch
once more
a place of light.
Witch-woman,
tall, slender,
Circe at her loom
or murderous Medea,
Joan at her tree,
listening to voices
in the rustling of the leaves,
like the rustling of the flames
which ignited
her deciduous life…
Witch-woman,
burning goddess,
every woman bears
within her soul
the figure of the witch,
the face of the witch,
beautiful & hideous,
hidden as the lips
of her cunt,
open as her open eyes,
which see the fire
without screaming
as she & the tree, her mother,
are joined again,
seared,
united,
married as a forest
marries air,
only by its burning,
only by its rising
in Demeter’s flaming hands,
only by its leaping
heavenward
in a single
green
flame.
Baby-witch,
my daughter,
my worship of the Goddess
alone
condemns you to the fire…
I blow upon
your least fingernail
& it flares cyclamen & rose.
I suck flames from your ears.
I touch your perfect nostrils
& they, too, flame gently
like that pale rose
called “sweetheart.”
Your eyelids are tender purple
like the base of the flame
before it blues.
O child of fire,
O tiny devotee of the Goddess—
I wished for you
to be born a daughter
though we know
that daughters
cannot but be
born for burning
like the fatal
tree.
When the devil brings him,
like a Christmas puppy,
examine his downy fur & smell
his small paws for the scent
of sulphur.
Is he a child of hell?
O clearly those soft brown eyes
speak volumes
of deviltry.
O surely those small pink teats
could suckle witches.
O those floppy ears
hear only the devil’s hissing.
O that small pink tongue
will lick & lick at your heart
until only Satan may
slip in.
A fuzzy white dog?
Name him
Catch.
A little black kitten?
She is
Jamara
.
A tiny brown rabbit?
Call her
Pyewackett.
Beware, beware—
the soft, the innocent,
the kingdom of cuddly ones—
All these
expose you to the jealous tongues
of neighbors’ flames,
all these
are the devil’s snares!
Familiar familiars—
there is hellfire lurking
in the softest fur,
brimstone in the pinkest tongue,
damnation everlasting
in a
purr
.
My broom
With its tuft of roses
beckoning at the black,
with its crown of thistles,
prickling the sky,
with its carved crescents
winking silverly
at Diana,
with its thick brush
of peacock feathers
sweeping the night,
with its triangle
of glinting fur.
I ride
over the roofs
of doom.
I ride
while he thinks me safe
in our bed.
My forehead
he thinks that scraggly
other broom,
my hips that staff,
my sex that stump
of blackthorn
& of twine.
Ah, I will ride
over the skies—
orange as apricots
slashed red
with pomegranate clouds—
He will think me safe in our bed.
He will think I fear
such fabulous
flight.
It is his bed I fear!
I will burn the clouds
with my marvelous broom.
I will catch Persephone’s seeds
on my flaming tongue.
Ah—if I burn for this,
how beautiful my ashes—
& how beautiful,
my beautiful, comet-tailed
broom!
Oh for a candle I could light
to draw you closer…
Oh for a poppet
made like you,
with your own lovely body
sewn again of cloth,
with your own pale
unseeing eyes,
with your own cock sweetly curving,
remade in wax or clay….
Oh for an herb
to place upon my tongue
to bring your tongue
to mine….
Oh for a potion
I could drink
or slip to you
at some stale
dinner party….
Oh for your nail parings…
Oh for your hairs…
stirred in a brew,
baked in a millet cake….
I would make a stew,
a soup, a witch’s mix
to bring your lovely thighs
on mine.
I would boil bats if not babies
& toads if not theologians
to make you care….
I would enter your blood
like malaria, enter your eyes
like laser beams, enter your palms
like the holy spirit
causing stigmata
to a sex-starved saint!
Oh love,
I would spell you
evol
if mere anagrams
would bring you
near….
But I spell you
love
& still
you do not
hear.
If you would poison your mind
with the bitter herb of self-hate,
nothing can save you:
not the lover who comes in the night
smelling of pitch & brimstone,
not the husband who comes in the light
smelling of hay & the golden turds of mares,
not the mother with her poisoned apple,
not the daughter with her wreaths of roses & opium poppies,
not the sister with her rosemary & rue,
not the brother with the mandrake root.
Having driven out the demons of the past
we find them now within.
No witches burn in the market
but our minds revolve upon their own spits;
no crucifixion upon Calvary
but a daily torture in the hills of the skull,
no smell of burning female flesh upon the heath,
but the acrid odor of the heart slowly smoldering.
What witchcraft will it take
to bend this world to our will?
Must we burn poisonous herbs
to kill the poisons in the streams?
Must we wear poultices of Henbane
& Deadly Nightshade
against the very air?
O take this garlic rosary,
this token of death’s breath,
this possessed vegetable,
this bulb of dried desire.
I am sick of haunting myself
from within
like an old house.
I would be happier
as a hunted witch.