Authors: Erica Jong
lose, losses, limbo.
I stand on a ledge in hell
still howling for our love.
If you come back
now
before the roadblocks
are too many,
before too many bodies
are stacked
between us,
before the demilitarized zone
fills up with the mud
of betrayal,
& counter-betrayal,
we may still find
it in our hearts
to trust each other.
We may still find
it in our bodies
to fit together.
We may still find
that our minds
curl around the same
jokes and rejoice
in the same
hijinks.
But if we wait
till the bodies pile up
to the sky,
till the blood
dries in the muddy trench,
we may just find
that it turns
to pale powder
& blows away.
For we know that
love can dry up
as surely as arroyos
were once raging rivers,
as surely as swamps
are deserts now,
as surely as oceans
turn to sand.
I do not fear
the blood
as much as I fear
its drying
until the smallest breath
can blow
our love, our dreams,
our mingled flesh
away.
There is only one story:
he loved her,
then stopped loving her,
while she did not
stop loving him.
There is only one story:
she loved him,
then stopped loving him,
while he did not
stop loving her.
The truth is simple:
you do not die
from love.
You only wish
you did.
My love is too much—
it embarrasses you—
blood, poems, babies,
red needs that telephone
from foreign countries,
black needs that spatter
the pages
of your white papery heart.
You would rather have a girl
with simpler needs:
lunch, sex, undemanding
loving,
dinner, wine, bed,
the occasional blow-job
& needs that are never
red as gaping wounds
but cool & blue
as television screens
in tract houses.
Oh my love,
those simple girls
with simple needs
read my books too.
They tell me they feel
the same as I do.
They tell me I transcribe
the language of their hearts.
They tell me I translate
their mute, unspoken pain
in the white light
of language.
Oh love,
no love
is ever wholly undemanding.
It can pretend coolness
until the pain comes,
until the first baby comes,
howling her own infant need
into a universe
that never summoned her.
The love you seek
cannot be found
except in the white pages
of recipe books.
It is cooking you seek,
not love,
cooking with sex coming after,
cool sex
that speaks to the penis alone,
& not the howling chaos
of the heart.
Is God the one who eats the meat off the bones of dead people?
—Molly Miranda Jong-Fast, age 3½
God is the one,
Molly,
whether we call him
Him
or Her,
tree form or spewing
volcano,
Vesuvius or vulva,
penis-rock,
or reindeer-on-cave-wall,
God is the one
who eats
our meat,
Molly,
& we yield
our meat
up willingly.
Meat is our
element,
meat is our
lesson.
When our bodies fill
with each other,
when our blood swells
in our organs
aching for another,
body of meat,
heart of meat,
soul of meat,
we are only doing
what God wants
us to—
meat joining meat
to become insubstantial air,
meat fusing
with meat
to make
a small wonder
like you.
The wonder of you
is that you push
our questions
along into
the future—
so that I know
again
the wonder of meat
through you,
the wonder of meat
turning to philosophy,
the wonder of meat
transubstantiated
into poetry,
the wonder of
sky-blue meat
in your roundest eyes,
the wonder of
dawn-colored meat
in your cheeks & palms,
the wonder of meat
becoming
air.
You
are my theorem,
my proof,
my meaty metaphysics,
my little questioner,
my small Socrates
of the nursery-schoolyard.
To think that
such wonder
can come from meat!
Well then,
if God is hungry—
let Him eat,
let Her eat.
“Why do you
have stripes
in your forehead,
Mama?
Are you
old?”
Not old.
But not so
young
that I cannot
see
the world contracting
upon itself
& the circle
closing at the end.
As the furrows
in my brow
deepen,
I can see
myself
sinking back
into that childhood
street
I walked along
with my grandfather,
thinking he was old
at sixty-three
since I was four,
as you are four
to my
forty.
Forty years
to take
the road out.
Will another forty
take me
back?
Back to the street
I grew up on,
back to
my mother’s breast,
back to the second
world war
of a second
child,
back
to the cradle
endlessly
rocking?
I am young
as
you
are,
Molly—
yet with stripes
in my brow;
I earn my youth
as you must earn
your age.
These stripes
are decorations
for my valor—
forty years
of marching
to a war
I could not declare,
our locate,
yet have somehow
won.
Now,
I begin
to unwin,
unraveling
the sleeves
of care
that have
stitched up
this brow,
unraveling
the threads
that have kept
me scared,
as I pranced
over the world,
seemingly fearless,
working
without a net,
knowing
if I fell
it would
only be
into that same
childhood street,
where I dreaded
to tread
on the lines—
not knowing
the lines
would someday
tread
on me,
Molly,
when you are forty,
read this poem
& tell me:
have we won
or lost
the war?
(Elegy for my grandfather who painted the sea & horses)
A dream of fantastic horses
galloping out of the sea,
the sea itself a dream,
a dream of green on green,
an age of indolence
where one-celled animals
blossom, once more, into limbs,
brains, pounding hooves,
out of the terrible innocence
of the waves.
Venice on the crest
of hell’s typhoon,
sunami of my dreams
when, all at once,
I wake at three a.m.
in a tidal wave of love & sleeplessness,
anxiety & dread.
Up from the dream,
up on the shining white ledge of dread—
I dredge the deep
for proof that we do not die,
for proof that love
is a seawall against despair,
& find only
the one-celled dreams
dividing & dividing
as in the primal light.
O my grandfather,
you who painted the sea
so obsessively,
you who painted horses
galloping, galloping
out of the sea—
go now,
ride on the bare back
of the unsaddled,
unsaddleable horse
who would take you
straight to hell.
Gallop on the back
of all my nightmares;
dance in the foam
in a riot of hooves
& let the devil paint you
with his sea-green brush;
let him take you
into the waves at last,
until you fall,
chiming forever,
through the seaweed bells,
lost like the horses of San Marco,
but not for good.
Down through the hulls
of gelatinous fish,
down through the foamless foam
which coats your bones,
down through the undersea green
which changes your flesh
into pure pigment,
grinding your eyes down
to the essential cobalt blue.
Let the bones of my poems
support what is left of you—
ashes & nightmares,
canvasses half-finished & fading worksheets.
O my grandfather,
as you die,
a poem forms on my lips,
as foam forms
on the ocean’s morning mouth,
& I sing in honor of the sea & you—
the sea who defies all paintings
& all poems
& you
who defy
the sea.
From
Loveroot
by Erica Jong
Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, Inc.
To Pablo Neruda
Dear Colette
Dear Marys, Dear Mother, Dear Daughter (originally published as Mary, Mary)
Elegy for a Whale
For My Sister, Against Narrowness
For My Husband
Cheever’s People
Dear Anne Sexton, I
Dear Anne Sexton, II
Dearest Man-in-the-Moon
Dear Keats
Becoming a Nun
Empty
Egyptology
Parable of the Four-Poster
Tapestry, with Unicorn
The Poet Writes in
I
Sunjuice
Insomnia and Poetry
Copyright © 1977 by Erica Mann Jong
From
How to Save Your Own Life
by Erica Mann Jong
Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, Inc.
The Puzzle
The Long Tunnel of Wanting You
The Muse Who Came to Stay
We Learned
Doubts Before Dreaming
The Dirty Laundry Poem
Sailing Home
Living Happily Ever After
The Surgery of the Sea
After the Earthquake
Copyright © 1981 by Erica Mann Jong
From
Witches
by Erica Jong
Reprinted by permission of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
To the Goddess
To the Horned God
Figure of the Witch
Baby-Witch
How to Name Your Familiar
Her Broom, or the Ride of the Witch
Love Magick
Bitter Herb
For All Those Who Died
A Deadly Herbal in Verse (Mandrake, Henbane, Thorn Apple, Deadly Nightshade, Monkshood)
E
RICA
J
ONG
is an award-winning poet, novelist, and memoirist, and one of the nation’s most distinctive voices on women and sexuality. She has won many literary awards: the Bess Hokin Prize from
Poetry
magazine (also awarded to Sylvia Plath and W. S. Merwin); a National Endowment for the Arts award; the first Fernanda Pivano Award in Italy (named for the critic who introduced Ernest Hemingway, Allen Ginsberg, and Erica Jong herself to the Italian public); the Sigmund Freud Award for Literature, also it Italy; the United Nations Award for Excellence in Literature; and the Deauville Award for Literary Excellence in France.
Raised by artists in the intellectual melting pot of New York’s Upper West Side, Jong graduated from the High School of Music & Art and Barnard College, where she majored in writing and Italian literature. She then completed a Master’s degree in eighteenth-century English literature at Columbia (1965) and began PhD studies. She first attracted serious attention as a poet, publishing her debut volume,
Fruits & Vegetables
, in 1971 and her second,
Half-Lives
, in 1973.
Also in 1973, she published the book for which she is best known. Partially drawing on Jong’s early life, as well as her wild imagination,
Fear of Flying
, hailed by John Updike as the female answer to
Portnoy’s Complaint
and
The Catcher in the Rye
, is about a woman trying to find herself and learn how to fly free of her repressions. Isadora Wing seeks to discover her soul and her sexuality, and in the process, she delves into erotic fantasy and experimentation, shocking many critics—but delighting readers.
While the book’s explicitness inevitably drew controversy, the novel has endured because of its psychological depth and wild humor. Its heroine, Isadora Wing, whose quest for liberation and happiness struck a chord with many readers, galvanized them to change their lives. The novel gathered momentum, eventually landing on top of the
New York Times
bestseller list. It has since sold over twenty-six million copies in forty languages. It has been as beloved in Asia, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and South America as in North America, and has been written about, studied, and taught in universities.