Authors: Erica Jong
Secretly, slowly in the dark,
it put out grub-white roots
which filled a jelly jar.
From this unlikely start,
an avocado tree with bark
& dark green leaves
shaded the green silk couch
which shaded me
throughout my shady adolescence.
There, beneath that tree
my skirt gave birth to hands!
Oh memorable hands of boys
with blacked-out eyes
like culprits
in the
National Enquirer.
My mother nursed that tree
like all her children,
turned it around so often
towards the sun
that its trunk grew twisted
as an old riverbed,
& despite its gaudy leaves
it never bore
fruit.
4
Cantaloupes: the setting sun at Paestum
slashed by rosy columns.
5
I am thinking of the onion again, with its two O mouths, like the gaping holes in nobody. Of the outer skin, pinkish brown, peeled to reveal a greenish sphere, bald as a dead planet, glib as glass, & an odor almost animal. I consider its ability to draw tears, its capacity for self-scrutiny, flaying itself away, layer on layer, in search of its heart which is simply another region of skin, but deeper & greener. I remember Peer Gynt. I consider its sometimes double heart. Then I think of despair when the onion searches its soul & finds only its various skins; & I think of the dried tuft of roots leading nowhere & the parched umbilicus, lopped off in the garden. Not self-righteous like the proletarian potato, nor a siren like the apple. No show-off like the banana. But a modest, self-effacing vegetable, questioning, introspective, peeling itself away, or merely radiating halos like lake ripples. I consider it the eternal outsider, the middle child, the sad analysand of the vegetable kingdom. Glorified only in France (otherwise silent sustainer of soups & stews), unloved for itself alone—no wonder it draws our tears! Then I think again how the outer peel resembles paper, how soul & skin merge into one, how each peeling strips bare a heart which in turn turns skin…
6
A poet in a world without onions,
in a world without apples
regards the earth as a great fruit.
Far off, galaxies glitter like currants.
The whole edible universe drops
to his watering mouth…
Think of generations of mystics
salivating for the fruit of god,
of poets yearning to inhabit apples,
of the sea, that dark fruit,
closing much more quickly than a wound,
of the nameless galaxies of astronomers,
hoping that the cosmos will ripen
& their eyes will become tongues…
7
For the taste of the fruit
is the tongue’s dream,
& the apple’s red
is the passion of the eye.
8
If a woman wants to be a poet,
she must dwell in the house of the tomato.
9
It is not an emptiness,
the fruit between your legs,
but the long hall of history,
& dreams are coming down the hall
by moonlight.
10
They push up through the loam
like lips of mushrooms.
11
(Artichoke, after Child): Holding the heart base up, rotate it slowly with your left hand against the blade of a knife held firmly in your right hand to remove all pieces of ambition & expose the pale surface of the heart. Frequently rub the cut portions with gall. Drop each heart as it is finished into acidulated water. The choke can be removed after cooking.
12
(Artichoke, after Neruda)
It is green at the artichoke heart,
but remember the times
you flayed
leaf after leaf,
hoarding the pale silver paste
behind the fortresses of your teeth,
tonguing the vinaigrette,
only to find the husk of a worm
at the artichoke heart?
The palate reels like a wronged lover.
Was all that sweetness counterfeit?
Must you vomit back
world after vegetable world
for the sake of one worm
in the green garden of the heart?
13
But the poem about bananas has not yet been written. Southerners worry a lot about bananas. Their skin. And nearly everyone worries about the size of bananas, as if that had anything to do with flavor. Small bananas are sometimes quite sweet. But bananas are like poets: they only want to be told how great they are. Green bananas want to be told they’re ripe. According to Freud, girls envy bananas. In America, chocolate syrup & whipped cream have been known to enhance the flavor of bananas. This is called a banana split.
14
The rice is pregnant.
It swells past its old transparency.
Hard, translucent worlds inside the grains
open like fans. It is raining rice!
The peasants stand under oiled
rice paper umbrellas cheering.
Someone is scattering rice from the sky!
Chopper blades mash the clouds.
The sky browns like cheese soufflé.
Rice grains puff & pop open.
“What have we done to deserve this?”
the peasants cry. Even the babies
are cheering. Cheers slide from their lips
like spittle. Old men kick their clogs
into the air & run in the rice paddies
barefoot. This is a monsoon! A wedding!
Each grain has a tiny invisible parachute.
Each grain is a rain drop.
“They have sent us rice!” the mothers scream,
opening their throats to the smoke…
15
Here should be a picture of my favorite apple.
It is also a nude & bottle.
It is also a landscape.
There are no such things as still lives.
16
In general, modern poetry requires (underline one): a) more fruit; b) less fruit; c) more vegetables; d) less vegetables; e) all of the above; f) none of the above.
17
Astonishment of apples. Every fall.
But only Italians are into grapes,
calling them
eggs
.
O my eggs,
branching off my family tree,
my father used to pluck you,
leaving bare twigs on the dining room table,
leaving mother furious on the dining room table:
picked clean.
Bare ruined choirs
where late the sweet.
A pile of pits.
18
Adam naming the fruit
after the creation of fruit,
his tongue tickling
the crimson lips of the pomegranate,
the tip of his penis licking
the cheeks of the peach,
quince petals in his hair,
his blue arms full of plums,
his legs wrapped around watermelons,
dandling pumpkins on his fatherly knees,
tomatoes heaped around him in red pyramids…
peach
peach
peach
peach
peach
he sighs
to kingdom come.
The man under the bed
The man who has been there for years waiting
The man who waits for my floating bare foot
The man who is silent as dustballs riding the darkness
The man whose breath is the breathing of small white butterflies
The man whose breathing I hear when I pick up the phone
The man in the mirror whose breath blackens silver
The boneman in closets who rattles the mothballs
The man at the end of the end of the line
I met him tonight I always meet him
He stands in the amber air of a bar
When the shrimp curl like beckoning fingers
& ride through the air on their toothpick skewers
When the ice cracks & I am about to fall through
he arranges his face around its hollows
he opens his pupilless eyes at me
For years he has waited to drag me down
& now he tells me
he has only waited to take me home
We waltz through the street like death & the maiden
We float through the wall of the wall of my room
If he’s my dream he will fold back into my body
His breath writes letters of mist on the glass of my cheeks
I wrap myself around him like the darkness
I breathe into his mouth
& make him real
All over the district, on leather couches
& brocade couches, on daybeds
& “professional divans,” they are confessing.
The air is thick with it,
the ears of the analysts must be sticky.
Words fill the air above couches & hover there
hanging like smog. I imagine
impossible Steinberg scrolls,
unutterable sounds suspended in inked curlicues
while the Braque print & the innocuous Utrillo
look on look on look on.
My six analysts, for example—
the sly Czech who tucked his shoelaces
under the tongues of his shoes,
the mistress of social work with orange hair,
the famous old German who said:
“You sink, zerefore you are,”
the bouncy American who loved to talk dirty,
the bitchy widow of a famous theoretician,
& another—or was it two?—I have forgotten—
they rise like a Greek chorus in my dreams.
They reproach me for my messy life.
They do not offer to refund my money
& the others—siblings for an hour or so—
ghosts whom I brushed in & out of the door.
Sometimes the couch was warm from their bodies.
Only our coats knew each other,
rubbing shoulders in the dark closet.
(
a flip through
BRIDE’S
)
The silver spoons
were warbling
their absurd musical names
when, drawing back
her veil (illusion),
she stepped into
the valentine-shaped bathtub,
& slid her perfect bubbles
in between
the perfect bubbles.
Oh brilliantly complex as
compound interest,
her diamond gleams
(Forever) on the edge
of a weddingcake-shaped bed.
What happens there
is merely icing since
a snakepit of dismembered
douchebag coils (all writhing)
awaits her on the tackier back pages.
Dearly beloved, let’s hymn
her (& Daddy) down
the aisle with
epithalamia composed
for Ovulen ads:
“It’s the right
of every (married) couple
to wait to space to wait”
—& antistrophes
appended by the Pope.
Good Grief—the groom!
Has she (or we)
entirely forgot?
She’ll dream him whole.
American type with ushers
halfbacks headaches drawbacks backaches
& borrowed suit
stuffed in a borrowed face
(or was it the reverse?)
Oh well. Here’s he:
part coy pajamas,
part mothered underwear
& of course
an enormous prick
full of money.
You don’t really want to be a poet. First of all, if you’re a woman, you have to be three times as good as any of the men. Secondly, you have to fuck everyone. And thirdly, you hare to be dead.
—Mark Strand, in conversation
If a woman wants to be a poet,
she should sleep near the moon with her face open;
she should walk through herself studying the landscape;
she should not write her poems in menstrual blood.
If a woman wants to be a poet,
she should run backwards circling the volcano;
she should feel for the movement along her faults;
she should not get a Ph.D. in seismography.
If a woman wants to be a poet,
she should not sleep with uncircumcised manuscripts;
she should not write odes to her abortions;
she should not make stew of old unicorn meat.
If a woman wants to be a poet,
she should read French cookbooks and Chinese vegetables;
she should suck on French poets to freshen her breath;
she should not masturbate in writing seminars.
If a woman wants to be a poet,
she should peel back the hair from her eyeballs;
she should listen to the breathing of sleeping men;
she should listen to the spaces between that breathing.
If a woman wants to be a poet,
she should not write her poems with a dildo;
she should pray that her daughters are women;
she should forgive her father for his bravest sperm.
(balm for a 27th birthday)
Hooked on for two years now on wrinkle creams creams for
crowsfeet ugly lines (if only there were one!)
any perfumed grease which promises youth beauty
not truth but all I need on earth
I’ve been studying how women age
how
it starts around the eyes so you can tell
a woman of 22 from one of 28 merely by
a faint scribbling near the lids a subtle crinkle
a fine line
extending from the fields of vision
this
in itself is not unbeautiful promising
as it often does
insights which clear-eyed 22 has no inkling of
promising certain sure-thighed things in bed
certain fingers on your spine & lids
but
it’s only the beginning as ruin proceeds downward
lingering for a while around the mouth hardening the smile
into prearranged patterns (irreversible!) writing furrows
from the wings of the nose (oh nothing much at first
but “showing promise” like your early poems
of deepening)
& plotting lower to the corners of the mouth drooping them
a little like the tragic mask though not at all grotesque