Authors: Erica Jong
nervous before flight,
do needlepoint—
blue irises & yellow daffodils
against a stippled woolen sky.
She pushes the needle
in & out
as she once pushed me:
sharp needle to the canvas of her life—
embroidering her faults
in prose & poetry,
writing the fiction
of my bitterness,
the poems of my need.
“You hate me,” she accuses,
needle poised,
“why not admit it?”
I shake my head.
The air is thick
with love gone bad,
the odor of old blood.
If I were small enough
I would suck your breast
…
but I say nothing,
big mouth,
filled with poems.
Whatever love is made of—
wool, blood, Sunday lamb,
books of verse
with violets crushed
between the pages,
tea with herbs,
lemon juice for hair,
portraits sketched of me asleep
at nine months old—
this twisted skein
of multicolored wool,
this dappled canvas
or this page of print
joins us
like the twisted purple cord
through which we first pulsed poems.
Mother, what I feel for you
is more
& less
than love.
2 /
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin & Mary Godwin Shelley
She was “lonesome
as a Crusoe,”
orphaned by childbirth,
orphaned being born,
killing her mother
with a stubborn afterbirth—
the medium they’d shared….
Puppies were brought
to draw off Mary’s milk,
& baby Mary screamed.
She grew up
to marry Shelley,
have four babes
(of whom three died)—
& one immortal monster.
Byron & Shelley
strutted near the lake
& wrote their poems
on purest alpine air.
The women had their pregnancies
& fears.
They bore the babies,
copied manuscripts,
& listened to the talk
that love was “free.”
The brotherhood of man
did not apply:
all they contributed
to life
was life.
& Doctor Frankenstein
was punished
for his pride:
the hubris of a man
creating life.
He reared a wretched
animated corpse—
& Shelley praised the book
but missed the point.
Who were these gothic monsters?
Merely men.
Self-exiled Byron
with his Mistress Fame,
& Percy Shelley
with his brains aboil,
the seaman
who had never learned to swim.
Dear Marys,
it was clear
that you were truer.
Daughters of daughters,
mothers of future mothers,
you sought to soar
beyond complaints
of woman’s lot—
& died in childbirth
for the Rights of Man.
3 /
Exiles
This was the sharpness
of my mother’s lesson.
Being a woman
meant eternal strife.
No colored wool could stitch
the trouble up;
no needlepoint
could cover it with flowers.
When Byron played
the exiled wanderer,
he left his ladies
pregnant or in ruin.
He left his children
fatherless for fame,
then wrote great letters
theorizing pain.
He scarcely knew
his daughters any more
than Mary knew the Mary
who expired giving her birth.
All that remained in him:
a hollow loneliness
about the heart,
the milkless tug of memory,
the singleness of creatures
who breath air.
Birth is the start
of loneliness
& loneliness the start
of poetry:
that seems a crude
reduction of it all,
but truth
is often crude.
& so I dream
of daughters
as a man might dream
of giving birth,
& as my mother dreamed
of daughters
& had three—
none of them her dream.
& I reach out for love
to other women
while my real mother
pines for me
& I pine for her,
knowing I would have to be
smaller than a needle
pierced with wool
to pierce the canvas of her life
again.
4 /
Dear Daughter
Will you change all this
by my having you,
& by your having everything—
Don Juan’s exuberance,
Childe Harold’s pilgrimage,
books & babies,
recipes & riots?
Probably not.
In making daughters
there is so much needlepoint,
so much doing & undoing,
so much yearning—
that the finished pattern cannot please.
My poems will have daughters
everywhere,
but my own daughter
will have to grow
into her energy.
I will not call her Mary
or Erica.
She will shape
a wholly separate name.
& if her finger falters
on the needle,
& if she ever needs to say
she hates me,
& if she loathes poetry
& loves to whistle,
& if she never
calls me Mother,
She will always be my daughter—
my filament of soul
that flew,
& caught.
She will come
in a radiance of new-made skin,
in a room of dying men
and dying flowers,
in the shadow of her large mother,
with her books propped up
& her ink-stained fingers,
lying back on pillows
white as blank pages,
laughing—
“I did it without
words!”
Francis, the only pregnant white whale in captivity, died last night of internal poisoning in her tank at the New York Aquarium at Coney Island….
—The New York Times,
May 26, 1974
Too big & too intelligent
to reproduce,
the ferns will outlast us,
not needing each other
with their dark spores,
& the cockroaches
with their millions of egg-cases,
& even the one-celled waltzers
dancing pseudopod to pseudopod,
but we are too big, too smart
to stick around.
Floating in Coney Island,
floating on her white belly—
while the fetus flips its flippers
in the womb
& she circles in the belly of the tank.
The last calf
beat her brains out
minutes after birth
& this one died unborn…
Fourteen months in the womb,
fourteen months to enter
the world of whaledom
through a tank in Coney Island.
Not worth it,
the calf decides,
& dies,
taking along its mother.
♦
The whales are friendly, social animals,
& produce big, brainy babies;
produce them one by one
in the deep arctic waters,
produce them painfully
through months of mating
& pregnancies that last more than a year.
They croon to their unborn calves
in poetry—whale poetry
which only a few humans
have been privileged to hear.
Melville died for the privilege
& so will I
straining my ears
all the way to Coney Island.
♦
Dear Francis, dead at ten
in your second pregnancy,
in the seventh year of captivity…
Was it weariness of the tank, the cage,
the zoo-prison of marriage?
Or was it loneliness—
the loneliness of pregnant whales?
Or was it nostalgia for the womb,
the arctic waste,
the belly of your own cold mother?
When a whale dies at sixteen hundred pounds
we must make big moans.
When a whale dies with an unborn baby
of one hundred and fifty pounds—
a small elegy is not enough;
we must weep loud enough
to be heard
all the way to Coney Island.
♦
Why am I weeping
into
The New York Times
for a big beluga whale
who could never have been
my sister?
Why am I weeping for a baby whale
who died happy
in the confines of the womb?
Because when the big-brained babies
die, we are all dying;
& the ferns live on
shivering
in the warm wind.
Narrowing life because of the fears,
narrowing it between the dust motes,
narrowing the pink baby
between the green-limbed monsters,
& the drooling idiots,
& the ghosts of Thalidomide infants,
narrowing hope,
always narrowing hope.
Mother sits on one shoulder hissing:
Life is dangerous
.
Father sits on the other sighing:
Lucky you
.
Grandmother, grandfather, big sister:
You’ll die if you leave us,
you’ll die if you ever leave us
.
Sweetheart, baby sister,
you’ll die anyway
& so will I.
Even if you walk the wide greensward,
even if you
& your beautiful big belly
embrace the world of men & trees,
even if you moan with pleasure,
& smoke the sweet grass
& feast on strawberries in bed,
you’ll die anyway—
wide or narrow,
you’re going to die.
As long as you’re at it,
die wide.
Follow your belly to the green pasture.
Lie down in the sun’s dapple.
Life is not as dangerous
as mother said.
It is more dangerous,
more wide.
You sleep in the darkness,
you with the back I love
& the gift of sleeping
through my noisy nights of poetry.
I have taken other men into my thoughts
since I met you.
I have loved parts of them.
But only you sleep on through the darkness
like a mountain where my house is planted,
like a rock on which my temple stands,
like a great dictionary holding every word—
even some
I have never spoken.
You breathe.
The pages of your dreams are riffled
by the winds of my writing.
The pillow creases your cheek
as I cover pages.
Element in which I swim
or fly,
silent muse, backbone, companion—
it is unfashionable
to confess to marriage—
yet I feel no bondage
in this air we share.
These beautifully grown men. These hungerers.
Look at them looking!
They’re overdrawn on all accounts but hope
& they’ve missed
(for the hundredth time) the express
to the city of dreams
& settled, sighing, for a desperate local;
so who’s to blame them
if they swim through swimming pools of twelve-
year-old scotch, or fall
in love with widows (other than their wives)
who suddenly can’t ride
in elevators? In that suburb of elms
& crabgrass (to which
the angel banished them) nothing is more real
than last night’s empties.
So, if they pack up, stuff their vitals
in a two-suiter,
& (with passports bluer than their eyes)
pose as barons
in Kitzbühel, or poets in Portofino,
something in us sails
off with them (dreaming of bacon-lettuce-
and-tomato sandwiches).
Oh, all the exiles of the twenties knew
that America
was discovered this way: desperate men,
wearing nostalgia
like a hangover, sailed out, sailed out
in search of passports,
eyes, an ancient kingdom, beyond the absurd
suburbs of the heart.
On line at the supermarket
waiting for the tally,
the blue numerals
tattooed
on the white skins
of paper,
I read your open book
of folly
and take heart,
poet of my heart.
The poet as housewife!
Keeper of steak & liver,
keeper of keys, locks, razors,
keeper of blood & apples,
of breasts & angels,
Jesus & beautiful women,
keeper also of women
who are not beautiful—
you glide in from Cape Ann
on your winged broomstick—
the housewife’s Pegasus.
You are sweeping the skies clear
of celestial rubbish.
You are placing a child there,
a heart here…
You are singing for your supper.
Dearest wordmother & hunger-teacher,
full professor of courage,
dean of women
in my school of books,
thank you.
I have checked out
pounds of meat & cans of soup.
I walk home laden,
light with writing you.
My dearest Anne,
I am living by a lake
with a young man
I met one week after you died.
His beard is red,
his eyes flicker like cat’s eyes,
& the amazing plum of his tongue
sweetens my brain.
He is like nobody
since I love him.
His cock sinks deep
in my heart.
♦
I have owed you a letter
for months.
♦
I wanted to chide