Authors: Erica Jong
only she can fill,
her shoes of purple suede and green leather
the color of palm fronds,
her diamond-studded boots,
her feathered cowboy boots,
her flame cowboy boots,
her seven-league epic poetry boots,
her little silver haiku boots
with the tiny heels that twinkle,
her first-person platform boots
and her backless glass slippers
modelled after Cinderella’s
(one lost, at midnight,
because of a running man),
her huntress boots of India-rubber,
her lover’s boots joined at the ankle
like leg irons,
her pink baby booties bronzed
for posterity,
her daughter’s burning Reeboks,
her lover’s laceless sneakers
left in the guest room closet
for her to kiss
year after year
after year.
Darling shoes,
beloved feet,
ten toes to walk me
toward my true love,
fuck-me pumps to fuel his passion,
stiletto heels to stab him
if he strays.
Shoes tell you everything.
Shoes speak my language.
Their tap taptap on the airport runway
tells me the story
of a lovely, lonely woman flying after love—
that old, old story
in a new pair
of shoes.
I, io, ich, yo, Я,
uppercase, lowercase,
sometimes confused with love
which starts with L,
but could easily be I,
with a foot,
a pseudopod facing the future,
or at least the righthand
margin of the page—
all we know of life
and all we need
to know.
The poet must abolish I,
said Keats;
have no identity,
be as water flowing
around a rock—
a voice for all
the unsaid waves within,
antenna of the deep.
“Here lies one whose name
was writ in water,”
he would have graven
on his gravestone
had he but world enough
and time—
but the harpstring broke,
and his dearest friends
would not deny his I—
(they could not
for they still believed
themselves).
Ich, I, io, yo, Я
turned from
lettres majuscules
to minuscule
by Cummings
(ee, I mean)
to droplets of vapor
condensed along a blade
of grass
(by Whitman),
to Blake’s tiger,
to Dickinson’s
buzzing fly…
(we so insist
on having names,
then die).
For the poet
whoever he (or she)
may be
is always
beneath the violets
singing like wind
or water.
To become a natural thing,
eye of the cosmos,
sans i’s, sans teeth,
sans everything,
to see the rock,
the hand, the water,
rippling around
the thrown pebble
as part of the same art,
the art of the possible,
life passing into death
and death to life—
poetry not politics.
The abolition of the I,
eye, eye,
the end of i,
so that even the dot
becomes a flyspeck,
Morse code
of infinity…
The alphabet is
poetry’s DNA;
what sperm and egg
are to our progeny,
the alphabet
is to the poet,
germ-cells,
single, yet dividing
like a zygote,
characters
encompassing
the world.
We are all one poet
and always
we have one
communal name,
god’s name, nameless,
a flame in the heart,
a breath,
a gust of air,
prana whistling in the dark.
i dies—
but the breath
lingers on
through the medium
of the magic
alphabet
and in its wake
death is no more
than metaphor.
At dusk Demeter
becomes afraid
for baby Persephone
lost in that hell
which she herself created
with her love.
Excess of love—
the woman’s curse,
the curse of loving
that which causes pain,
the curse of bringing forth
in pain,
the curse of bearing,
bearing always pain.
Demeter pauses, listening for her child—
this fertile goddess
with her golden hair, bringing forth
wheat and fruit and wildflowers
knee-high.
This apple-breasted goddess
whose sad eyes
will bless the frozen world,
bring spring again—
all because she once
walked through the night
and loved a man, half-demon,
angel-tongued,
who gave her
everything she needed to be wise:
a daughter,
hell’s black night,
then endless
spring.
They conspired to paint the air
knowing that art
is not only a way
of seeing
but a way
of being,
a passion for the light,
a tenderness at heart
just short
of being wounded by the air,
a toughness too.
They conspired to paint the air,
to anatomize each light mote,
to imprism each speck of dust
until the air danced with color
and every inhaled breath
became a rainbow in the lungs.
Jasmine, tea leaf, camellia,
tuberose and thyme—the air
turning to color, the color
bleeding into earth, the
earth giving forth its forms,
its fossils, its sexual smells,
then closing over all.
They conspired to paint the air,
leaving their mark,
an obsessed life,
infinitely rich,
infinitely ripe,
tasting of peaches
and anemones,
red tile,
voile peignoirs
and air,
inhabited air.
People wish to be settled. Only as long as they are unsettled is there any hope for them
.
—Thoreau
My life has been
the instrument
for a mouth
I have never seen,
breathing wind
which comes
from I know not
where,
arranging and changing
my moods,
so as to make
an opening
for his voice.
Or hers.
Muse, White Goddess
mother with invisible
milk,
androgynous god
in whose grip
I struggle,
turning this way and that,
believing that I chart
my life,
my loves,
when in fact
it is she, he,
who charts them—
all for the sake
of some
as yet unwritten poem.
Twisting in the wind,
twisting like a pirate
dangling in a cage
from a high seawall,
the wind whips
through my bones
making an instrument,
my back a xylophone,
my sex a triangle
chiming,
my lips stretched tight
as drumskins,
I no longer care
who is playing me,
but fear
makes the hairs
stand up
on the backs
of my hands
when I think
that she may stop.
And yet I long
for peace
as fervently as you do—
the sweet connubial bliss
that admits no
turbulence,
the settled life
that defeats poetry,
the hearth before which
children play—
not poets’ children,
ragtag, neurotic, demon-ridden,
but the apple-cheeked children
of the bourgeoisie.
My daughter dreams
of peace
as I do:
marriage, proper house,
proper husband,
nourishing dreamless
sex,
love like a hot toddy,
or an apple pie.
But the muse
has other plans
for me
and you.
Puppet mistress,
dangling us
on this dark proscenium,
pulling our strings,
blowing us
toward Cornwall,
toward Venice, toward Delphi,
toward some lurching
counterpane,
a tent upheld
by one throbbing
blood-drenched pole—
her pen, her pencil,
the monolith
we worship,
underneath
the gleaming moon.
My daughter says
she feels like a martian,
that no one understands her,
that one friend is too perfect,
and another too mean,
and that she has
the earliest bedtime
in her whole class.
I strain to remember
how a third grader feels
about love, about pain
and I feel a hollow in my heart
where there should be blood
and an ache where there should
be certainty.
My darling Molly,
no earthling ever lived
who did not feel
like a Martian,
who did not curse her bedtime,
who did not wonder
how she got to this planet,
who dropped her here
and why
and how she can possibly
stay.
I go to bed
whenever I like
and with whomever I choose,
but still I wonder
why I do not
belong in my class,
and where my class is anyway,
and why so many of them
seem to be asleep
while I toss and turn
in perplexity.
They, meanwhile, imagine I am perfect
and have solved everything:
an earthling among the Martians,
at home on her home planet,
feet planted in green grass.
If only we could all admit
that none of us belongs here,
that all of us are Martians,
and that our bedtimes
are always
too early
or
too late.
Driving me away
is easier
than saying
goodbye—
kissing the air,
the last syllable
of truth
being always
two lips compressed
around
emptiness—
the emptiness
you dread
yet return to
as just punishment,
just reward.
Who
loved you
so relentlessly?
Who lost you
in that howling void
between infancy
and death?
It is punctuated
by the warm bodies
of women,
who hold you for a while
then run
down that echoing corridor,
doing
as they are told.
Here I was begging the Muse not to get me in trouble with the powers that be, not to make me write out all those “filthy” words…pointing out in that deaf and dumb language which I employed when dealing with the Voice that soon…I would have to write my books in Jail or at the foot of the gallows…and these holy cows deep in clover render a verdict of guilty, guilty of dreaming it up “to make money”!
—
Henry Miller
The land of fuck
is not for sale.
Caught between
the muslin curtains
of the nursery
and the red damask
of the whorehouse,
the gambling den,
the mafia chieftains’
restaurant
(in whose backroom the big men
with big bellies,
big guns,
and little dicks
gamble lives
away
on a flipped card
or a throw
of bones)—
the land of fuck
is not for sale.
You can steal it
if you dare.
In a dream
you can ascend
to that special room
above the shadowy El
where, amid the rattling trains
carrying bug-eyed
exhibitionists
and drooling
adolescent boys
with perpetual
hard-ons,
the students of Fuck
go to spill their lives away
and the semen pools
under their luminous chairs.
The land of fuck
is not for sale
any more than
the sea is,
and it smells the same.
Ocean wreckage
at low tide: salt and rot
and sea meat left in the sun
too long,
sweet slime
between epochs of bone
and dust.
The land of fuck
is not for sale—
which does not mean
it has no price.
The tax
is tranquility, calm,
and the stillness of life.
The land of fuck
has a price.
Unable to bear
the uncertainty
of the future,
we consulted seers,
mediums, stock market gurus,
psychics who promised
happiness on this
or another planet,
astrologists of love,
seekers of the Holy Grail.
Looking for certainty
we asked for promises,
lover’s knots, pledges, rings,
certificates, deeds of ownership,
when it was always enough
to let your hand
pass over my body,
your eyes find the depths of my own,
and the wind pass over our faces
as it will pass
through our bones,
sooner than we think.