Authors: Erica Jong
as yet & then as you sidestep into the 4th decade
beginning to crease the neck (just slightly)
though the breasts below
especially
When they’re small (like mine) may stay high far
into the thirties
still the neck will give you away & after that the chin
which though you may snip it back & hike it up under
your earlobes will never quite love your bones as it once did
though
the belly may be kept firm through numerous pregnancies
by means of sit-ups jogging dancing (think of Russian
ballerinas)
& the cunt
as far as I know is ageless possibly immortal
becoming simply
more open more quick to understand more dry-eyed
than at 22
which
after all is what you were dying for (as you ravaged
islands of turtles beehives oysterbeds the udders
of cows)
desperate to censor changes which you simply might have let play
over you lying back listening opening yourself
letting the years make love the only way (poor blunderers)
they know
for Grace
The skin of the sea
has nothing to tell me.
I see her diving down
into herself—
past the bell-shaped jellyfish
who toll for no one—
& meaning to come back.
♦
In London, in the damp
of a London morning,
I see her sitting,
folding & unfolding herself,
while the blood
hammers like rain
on her heart’s windows.
This is her own country—
the sea, the rain
& death half rhyming
with her father’s name.
Obscene monosyllable,
it lingers for a while
on the roof
of the mouth’s house.
I stand here
savoring the sound,
like salt.
♦
They thought your death
was your last poem:
a black book
with gold-tooled cover
& pages the color of ash.
But I thought different,
knowing how madness
doesn’t believe
in metaphor.
When you began to feel
the drift of continents
beneath your feet,
the sea’s suck,
& each
atom of the poisoned air,
you lost
the luxury of simile.
Gull calls, broken shells,
the quarried coast.
This is where America ends,
dropping off
to the depths.
Death comes
differently in California.
Marilyn stalled
in celluloid,
the frame stuck,
& the light
burning through.
Bronze to her platinum,
Ondine, Ariel,
finally no one,
what could we tell you
after you dove down into yourself
& were swallowed
by your poems?
The old poet
with his face full of lines,
with iambs jumping in his hair like fleas,
with all the revisions of his body
unsaying him,
walks to the podium.
He is about to tell us
how he came to this.
for my parents
Who are these small determined figures
with turbaned heads
coming
to doric temples
in
fifteenth-century galleons
with
medieval castles
in the background?
They speak
& gesture in the halflight,
bring
cattle, parcels
to the classic shore
below the gothic hill.
Sunlight moonlight twilight starlight
gleams across
a stagey sea.
Clouds toss. Sails fill.
Windlessly,
what banners wave?
Whose landscape
is this mind?
Whose bluish breasts became
these castled hills?
Whose darkness is
this winter afternoon?
Whose darkness is
this darkening gallery?
Turn softly mind, wind,
Claude Lorrain,
Turner’s making
light of Venice,
showing
his true
colors.
For Alexander Mitscherlich
Lumbering down
in the early morning clatter
from farms
where the earth was hard all winter,
the market women bear
grapes blue as the veins
of fair-skinned women,
cherries dark as blood,
roses strewn like carnage
on makeshift altars.
They come
in ancient rattling trucks
which sprout geraniums,
are stained
with strawberries.
Their fingers thick
& thorn-pricked,
their huge smock-pockets
jingling pennies,
they walk,
heavy goddesses,
while the market
blossoms into bleeding
all round them.
Currants which glitter
like Christmas ornaments
are staining
their wooden boxes.
Cherries, grapes—
everything
seems to be bleeding!
I think
how a sentimental
German poet
might have written
that the cut rose
mourns the garden
& the grapes
their Rhineland vineyard
(where the crooked vines
stretch out their arms
like dancers)
for this
is a sentimental country
& Germans
are passionate gardeners
who view with humanity
the blights of roses,
the adversities of vineyards.
But I am not fooled.
This bleeding is, no doubt,
in the beholder’s eye,
& if
to tend a garden
is to be civilized,
surely this country
of fat cabbages
& love-lavished geraniums
would please
an eighteenth-century
philosopher.
Two centuries, however,
buzz above my head
like hornets over fruit.
I stuff my mouth with cherries
as I watch
the thorn-pricked fingers
of the market women
lifting & weighing,
weighing, weighing.
Because she lost her father
in the First World War,
her husband in the Second,
we don’t dispute
“There’s no
Gemütlichkeit
in America.”
We’re winning her heart
with filter cigarettes.
Puffing, she says,
“You can’t judge a country
by just twelve years.”
Gray days,
the wind hobbling down sidestreets,
I’m walking in a thirties photograph,
the prehistoric age
before my birth.
This town was never bombed.
Old ladies still wear funny shoes,
long, seedy furs.
They smell of camphor and camomile,
old photographs.
Nothing much happened here.
A few jewelry shops changed hands.
A brewery. Banks.
The university put up a swastika, took it down.
The students now chant HO CHI MINH & hate Americans
on principle.
Daddy wears a flyer’s cap
& never grew old.
He’s on the table with the teacakes.
Mother & grandma are widows.
They take care of things.
It rains nearly every day;
every day, they wash the windows.
They cultivate jungles in the front parlors,
lush tropics
framed by lacy white curtains.
They coax the earth with plant food, scrub the leaves.
Each plant shines like a fat child.
They hope for the sun,
living in a Jewless world without men.
(
Heidelberg, 1969
)
After the teach-in
we smeared the walls with
our solidarity,
looked left, & saw
Marx among the angels,
singing the blues.
The students march,
I (spectator)
follow.
Here (as everywhere)
the
Polizei
are clean, are clean.
In Frankfurt,
the whores lean out
their windows, screaming:
“Get a job—you dirty
hippies!” Or words
(auf Deutsch) to that effect.
I’m also waiting
for the Revolution,
friends.
Surely, my poems
will get better.
Surely, I’ll no longer
fear my dreams.
Surely I won’t murder
my capitalist father
each night
just to inherit
his love.
I only remember the onion, the egg and the boy. O that was me, said the madman.
—Nicholas Moore
1
“I bite into an apple & then get bored
before the second bite,” you said.
You were also Samson. I had cut
your hair & locked you up.
Besides, your room was bugged.
A former inmate left his muse
spread-eagled on the picture window.
In the glinting late-day sun
we saw her huge & cross-eyed breasts appear
diamond-etched
against the slums of Harlem.
You tongued your pills & cursed the residents.
You called me Judas.
You forgot I was a girl.
2
Your hands weren’t birds. To call
them birds would be too easy.
They drew circles around your ideas
& your ideas were sometimes parabolas.
That sudden Sunday you awoke
& found yourself behind the looking glass,
your hands perched on the breakfast table
waiting for a sign.
I had nothing to tell them.
They conversed with the eggs.
3
We walked.
Your automatic umbrella snapped
into place above your head
like a black halo.
We thought of climbing down rain puddles
as if they were manholes.
You said the reflected buildings
led to hell.
Trees danced for us,
cut-out people turned sideways
& disappeared into their voices.
The cities in our glasses took us in.
You stood on a scale, heard the penny drop—
but the needle was standing still!
It proved that you were God.
4
The elevator opens & reveals me
holding African violets.
An hour later I vanish
into a chasm whose dimensions
are 23 hours.
Tranquilized, brittle,
you strut the corridors
among the dapper young psychiatrists,
the girls who weave rugs all day,
unravel them all night,
the obesity cases lost in themselves.
You hum. You say you hate me.
I would like to shake you.
Remember how it happened?
You were standing at the window
speaking about flying.
Your hands flew to my throat.
When they came they found
our arms strewn around the floor
like broken toys.
We both were crying.
5
You stick. Somewhere in a cellar of my mind,
you stick. Fruit spoke to you
before it spoke to me. Apples cried
when you peeled them.
Tangerines jabbered in Japanese.
You stared into an oyster
sucked out God.
You were the hollow man,
with Milton entering your left foot.
6
My first husband!—God—
you’ve become an abstraction,
a kind of idea. I can’t even hear
your voice anymore. Only the black hair
curled on your belly makes you real—
I draw black curls on all the men I write.
I don’t even look anymore.
7
I thought of you in Istanbul.
Your Byzantine face,
thin lips & hollow cheeks,
the fanatical melting brown eyes.
In Hagia Sophia they’re stripping down
the moslem plaster
to find mosaics underneath.
The pieces fit in place.
You’d have been a Saint.
8
I’m good at interiors.
Gossip, sharpening edges, kitchen poems—
& have no luck at all with maps.
It’s because of being a woman
& having everything inside.
I decorated the cave,
hung it with animal skins & woolens,
such soft floors,
that when you fell
you thought you fell on me.
You had a perfect sense of bearings
to the end,
were always pointing North.
9
Flying you home—
good Christ—flying you home,
you were terrified.
You held my hand, I held
my father’s hand & he
filched pills from the psychiatrist
who’d come along for you.
The psychiatrist was 26 & scared.
He hoped I’d keep you calm.
& so we flew.
Hand in hand in hand in hand we flew.
The universe (which others call the library)…
—Jorge Luis Borges
Books which are stitched up the center with coarse white thread
Books on the beach with sunglass-colored pages
Books about food with pictures of weeping grapefruits
Books about baking bread with browned corners
Books about long-haired Frenchmen with uncut pages
Books of erotic engravings with pages that stick
Books about inns whose stars have sputtered out
Books of illuminations surrounded by darkness
Books with blank pages & printed margins
Books with fanatical footnotes in no-point type
Books with book lice