Authors: Erica Jong
bells,
her dried-up joke of a river, had played
the ark to all his fantasies of flood,
he felt a little foolish. He was walking
in the gallery then, thinking of the doges:
how they tread on clouds which puff and
pucker
like the flesh of their fat Venetian whores;
how thanks to Tintoretto’s shrewd, old eyes,
they saw themselves amid the holy saints;
how shrewd, old Tintoretto, for a price,
painted his patrons into paradise.
the sky sinks its blue teeth
into the mountains.
Rising on pure will
(the lurch & lift-off,
the sudden swing
into wide, white snow),
I encourage the cable.
Past the wind
& crossed tips of my skis
& the mauve shadows of pines
& the spoor of bears
& deer,
I speak to my fear,
rising, riding,
finding myself
the only thing
between snow & sky,
the link
that holds it all together.
Halfway up the wire,
we stop,
slide back a little
(a whirr of pulleys).
Astronauts circle above us today
in the television blue of space.
But the thin withers of alps
are waiting to take us too,
& this might be the moon!
We move!
Friends, this is a toy
merely for reaching mountains
Merely
for skiing down.
& now we’re dangling
like charms on the same bracelet
or upsidedown tightrope people
(a colossal circus!)
or absurd winged walkers,
angels in animal fur,
with mittened hands waving
& fear turning
& the mountain,
like a fisherman,
reeling us all in.
So we land
on the windy peak,
touch skis to snow,
are married to our purple shadows,
& ski back down
to the unimaginable valley
leaving no footprints.
Because you did, I too arrange flowers,
Watching the pistils jut like insolent tongues
And the hard, red flesh of the petals
Widening beneath my eyes. They move like
the hands
Of clocks, seeming not to move except
When I turn my gaze; then savagely
In the white room, they billow and spread
Until their redness engulfs me utterly.
Mother, you are far away and claim
In mournful letters that I do not need you;
Yet here in this sunny room, your tulips
Devour me, sucking hungrily
My watery nourishment, filling my house
Like a presence, like an enemy.
Geared to your intervals as the small hand
Of a clock repeats the larger, I,
Your too-faithful daughter, still drag behind
you,
Turning in the same slow circles.
Across the years and distances, my hands
Among these fierce, red blossoms repeat
Your gestures. I hope my daughter never
writes:
“Because you did, I too arrange flowers.”
He was a two-bit Petrarchist who lounged
Near the Uffizi in the ochre afternoons
Surveying the girls. A certain insolence
In how he moved his hips, his stony eyes,
His hands which seemed to cup their breasts
like fruit
As they slid by, pretending blank disdain,
Won him a modest reputation in a place
Where sad-eyed satyrs of an ageless middle
age
Are seldom scarce.
On rainy days he stalked
The galleries. Between the Giottos
And Masaccios, he slithered hissing
In his moccasins, and whistling low.
His metaphors were old; the girls were
young.
Their eyes (he said) were little lakes of blue
(Rolling the
bella lingua
off his tongue).
Their hair was gold, their lips like flowers
that grew
Within his
bel’ giardino
on the hill.
(Although he had no garden on the hill,
In summer the young girls grew thick as
weeds.)
Blonds were his passion but (like Tacitus)
he thought
The German fräuleins blowzy, rugged,
rough
And yet inevitable: August brought
Such hordes as might have sacked another
Rome.
He always sent the fair barbarians home
With something Burckhardt hardly hinted at.
(He kept his assignations in a Fiat.)
You should have seen his little pied-à-
terre—
Two blocks from where his mother lived;
there
He kept his treasures: blonds of every
nation—
(Two dozen half-undressed U.N.
legations)—
Were photographically ensconced along his
wall.
Beside the crucifix and Virgin was a small
Photo of la Mamma—which surveyed,
With madamely aplomb, the girls he’d laid.
(Note also: right below the feet of God,
A shelf with hair oil and Justine by Sade.)
He says he is a perfect poet.
He lives alone, with his perfect mate.
& sometimes they don’t even speak,
So perfectly do they “communicate.”
He lives alone, his greatest pleasures are
His pipes, his books, his wife’s behind—
Which he will often pinch to hear her laugh;
He’s got a perfect love for womankind.
He seldom writes, distrusting language as
A clumsy tool, unequal to his thoughts:
He uses it as rarely as he can
(No doubt to punish it for all its faults).
But when he writes, he keeps the upper hand
(On principle, since words are enemies).
He melts them down, then counterfeits his
own—
A kind of literary alchemy.
He’s fortunate to have a perfect muse.
A live-in muse, who cooks inspiringly;
And sometimes after an ambrosial meal,
He’ll grab his pen, composing feverishly
A perfect poem, describing in detail
The salad, wine, the roast in buttery baste.
And reading it, his musing wife agrees
That every line smacks of his perfect taste.
Now, moving in, cartons on the floor,
the radio playing to bare walls,
picture hooks left stranded
in the unsoiled squares where paintings
were,
and something reminding us
this is like all other moving days;
finding the dirty ends of someone else’s life,
hair fallen in the sink, a peach pit,
and burned-out matches in a corner;
things not preserved, yet never swept away
like fragments of disturbing dreams
we stumble on all day…
in ordering our lives, we will discard them,
scrub clean the floorboards of this our home
lest refuse from the lives we did not lead
become, in some strange, frightening way,
our own.
And we have plans that will not tolerate
our fears—a year laid out like rooms
in a new house—the dusty wine glasses
rinsed off, the vases filled, and bookshelves
sagging with the heavy winter books.
Seeing the room always as it will be,
we are content to dust and wait.
We will return here from the dark and silent
streets, arms full of books and food,
anxious as we always are in winter,
and looking for the Good Life we have
made.
I see myself then: tense, solemn,
in high-heeled shoes that pinch,
not basking in the light of goals fulfilled,
but looking back to now and seeing
a lazy, sunburned, sandaled girl
in a bare room, full of promise
and feeling envious.
Now we plan, postponing, pushing our lives
forward
into the future—as if, when the room
contains us and all our treasured junk
we will have filled whatever gap it is
that makes us wander, discontented
from ourselves.
The room will not change:
a rug, or armchair, or new coat of paint
won’t make much difference;
our eyes are fickle
but we remain the same beneath our suntans,
pale, frightened,
dreaming ourselves backward and forward
in time,
dreaming our dreaming selves.
I look forward and see myself look back.
Abandoned by their parents
in a wood,
Hansel & Gretel
found this place:
a child’s nightmare
run wild with weeds;
blank stage for the hero,
seats stepping off:
optical illusions;
poles for flags flapping:
cheering tongues;
pines bayonetting the sky;
a forest formed
of all the fears
in night’s imagination.
Now we come upon it hand in hand,
see nothing but an earthen bowl
littered with bottle bits
& condom wrappers,
disowned by the town,
harangued by rain,
the focus of conflicting
memories. (“Hitler spoke here.”
“No, he never did.”)
—As if it mattered.
This place is a house
bought by a manic
& not remembered
later in the asylum.
Invisible from the city,
forgotten in a gothic forest,
it waits for Hansel & Gretel
(us perhaps) to wake up,
dreaming some recurrent dream.
A delicate border. A nonexistent country.
The train obligingly dissolves in smoke.
The G.I. next to me is talking war.
I don’t “know the Asian mind,” he says.
Moving through old arguments.
At Potsdam (a globe-shaped dome,
a pink canal reflecting sepia trees)
we pull next to a broken-down old train
with
REICHSBAHN
lettered on its flank.
Thirty years sheer away leaving bare cliff.
This is a country I don’t recognize.
Bone-pale girls who have nothing to do with
home.
Everyone’s taller than me, everyone naked.
“Life’s cheap there,” he says.
But why are we screaming over a track
which runs between a barbed wire corridor?
And why has it grown so dark outside,
so bright in here
that even the pared moon is invisible?
In the window we can only see ourselves,
America we carry with us,
two scared people talking death
on a train which can’t stop.
Living in a house
near the Black Forest,
without any clocks,
she’s begun
to listen to the walls.
Her neighbors have clocks,
not one
but twenty clocks apiece.
Sometimes
a claque of clocks
applauds
the passing of each day.
Listen to the walls
& wind your watch.
Poor love, poor love,
have they caught you
by the pendulum?
Do they think they’ve
got you stopped?
Have you
already gathered how,
living near the Black Forest,
she gets by
on cups of borrowed time?
If you ask him he will talk for hours—
how at fourteen he hammered signs, fingers
raw with cold, and later painted bowers
in ladies’ boudoirs; how he played checkers
for two weeks in jail, and lived on dark bread;
how he fled the border to a country
which disappeared wars ago; unfriended
crossed a continent while this century
began. He seldom speaks of painting now.
Young men have time and theories; old men work.
He has painted countless portraits. Sallow
nameless faces, made glistening in oil, smirk
above anonymous mantelpieces.
The turpentine has a familiar smell,
but his hand trembles with odd, new palsies.
Perched on the maulstick, it nears the easel.
He has come to like his resignation.
In his sketch books, ink-dark cossacks hear
the snorts of horses in the crunch of snow.
His pen alone recalls that years ago,
one horseman set his teeth and aimed his spear
which, poised, seemed pointed straight to pierce the sun.
You take me to the restaurant where one
plays god over a fish tank. The fat trout
pace their green cage, waiting to be taken
out of an element. Who knows what they know?
There are thirteen in a tank meant
for goldfish. I don’t care which one I eat.
But the waiter expects a performance,
con brio. This is a ritual
solemn as wine-tasting or the Last Judgment.
Eating is never so simple as hunger.
Between the appetite and its satisfaction
falls the net, groping blindly in dark water.
The fish startle and thrash. You make your catch,
flourishing a bit for the waiter
so as not to be thought a peasant. You force
air into the trout’s gills as if he were Adam,
and send him squirming toward the kitchen
to be born. Then it’s my turn. I surprise
myself with my dexterity, almost
enjoying the game. A liter of wine
later, the fish return, foppishly dressed
in mushrooms and pimentos, their eyes
dreamily hazed. Darling, I am drunk. I watch you pluck
the trout’s ribs out of your perfect teeth.
The lessons we learned here