Authors: Erica Jong
fingers, toes,
little rose blooming
in a red universe,
which once wanted you less
than emptiness,
but now holds you
fast,
containing your rapid heart
beat under its
slower one
as the earth
contains the sea.
O avocado pit
almost ready to sprout,
tiny fruit tree
within sight
of the sea,
little swimming fish,
little land lover,
hold on!
hold on!
Here, under my heart
you’ll keep
till it’s time
for us to meet,
& we come apart
that we may come
together,
& you are born
remembering
the wavesound
of my blood,
the thunder of my heart,
& like your mother
always dreaming
of the sea.
The whole world is flat.
& I am round.
Even women avert their eyes,
& men, embarrassed
by the messy way
that life turns into life,
look away,
forgetting they themselves
were once this roundness
underneath the heart,
this helpless fish
swimming in eternity.
The sound of O,
not the sound of I
embarrasses the world.
My friends, who voluntarily have made
their bodies flat,
their writings flat as grief,
look at me in disbelief.
What is this large unseemly thing—
a pregnant poet?
an enormous walking O?
Oh take all letters of the alphabet but that!
We speak the Esperanto of the flat!
Condemned to sign
language & silence, pregnant poems
for men to snicker at,
for women to denounce,
I live alone.
My world is round
& bounded by the mountain of my fear;
while all the great geographers agree
the world is flat
& roundness cannot be.
Could I unthink you,
little heart,
what would I do?
Throw you out
with last night’s garbage,
undo my own decisions,
my own flesh
& commit you to the void
again?
Fortunately,
it is not my problem.
You hold on, beating
like a little clock,
Swiss in your precision,
Japanese in your tenacity,
& already having
your own karma,
while I, with myhalf-
hearted maternal urges,
my uncertainty that any creature
ever really creates
another (unless it be
herself), know you
as God’s poem
& myself merely as publisher,
as midwife,
as impresario,
oh, even, if you will,
as loathèd producer
of your
Grand Spectacle
:
you
are the star,
& like your humblest fan,
I wonder
(gazing at your image
on the screen)
who you really are.
Perishable women—
the colonial graveyards
are strewn with your bones,
the islands of the Caribbean
are rich with your deaths.
You perished
like the creatures of the reefs,
bringing forth your kind.
Perishable women—
dying at twenty, twenty-three,
“Beloved wife & Tender Mother,”
long lamented by your husband
(& his wives),
survivors who outlasted you,
then died
the way you died.
Only the men lived on
to perish in the wars,
to die of sharkbite
or of fever, bloody flux,
the smallpox, even leprosy
or gout
(one ate well
on these islands in the sun).
Everyone was perishable;
children died
like flies;
& women died
in giving birth to children
who would die.
God was blamed,
& Nature’s mighty hand
which wrought her handiwork
imperfectly,
& broke a hundred vessels
in the sea
that one whole
cup might be.
Perishable women—
smashed like pots
upon the floor beneath the wheel,
crushed like shells upon the beach,
like husks of coconut,
like bits of bottle glass.
At my age I’d be dead.
You would not be.
I am not interested
in my body—
the part that stinks
& rots & brings forth
life,
the part that the ground
swallows,
death giving birth
to death—
all of life,
considered
from the body’s
point of view,
is a downhill slide
& all our small
preservatives
& griefs
cannot reverse the trend.
All sensualists
turn puritan
at the end—
turning up lust’s soil
& finding bones
beneath the rich volcanic
dirt.
Some sleep in shrouds
& some in coffins;
some swear off
procreation, others turn
vegetarian, or worse:
they live on air—
on sheer platonic meals
of pure ideas;
once gluttons of the flesh,
they now become
gourmets of the mind.
How to resist that
when the spacious earth
swallows her children
so insatiably,
when all our space-age gods
are grounded,
& only the moan of pleasure
or the rasp of pain
can ever satisfy
the body’s appetite?
& yet my body,
in its dubious wisdom,
led to yours;
& you may
puzzle out
this mystery in your turn.
Choose mind, choose body,
choose to wed the two;
many have tried
but few have done the deed.
Through you, perhaps,
I may at last succeed.
On the first night
of the full moon,
the primeval sack of ocean
broke,
& I gave birth to you
little woman,
little carrot top,
little turned-up nose,
pushing you out of myself
as my mother
pushed
me out of herself,
as her mother did,
& her mother’s mother before her,
all of us born
of woman.
I am the second daughter
of a second daughter
of a second daughter,
but you shall be the first.
You shall see the phrase
“second sex”
only in puzzlement,
wondering how anyone,
except a madman,
could call you “second”
when you are so splendidly
first,
conferring even on your mother
firstness, vastness, fullness
as the moon at its fullest
lights up the sky.
Now the moon is full again
& you are four weeks old.
Little lion, lioness,
yowling for my breasts,
growling at the moon,
how I love your lustiness,
your red face demanding,
your hungry mouth howling,
your screams, your cries
which all spell life
in large letters
the color of blood.
You are born a woman
for the sheer glory of it,
little redhead, beautiful screamer.
You are no second sex,
but the first of the first;
& when the moon’s phases
fill out the cycle
of your life,
you will crow
for the joy
of being a woman,
telling the pallid moon
to go drown herself
in the blue ocean,
& glorying, glorying, glorying
in the rosy wonder
of your sunshining wondrous
self.
Love, death, sleeping
with somebody else’s husband
or wife—this
is what poetry is
about—Eskimo, Aztec,
or even Italian
Rinascimento,
or even the highfalutin Greeks
or noble Roman-O’s.
O the constant turmoil
of the human species—
beds, graves, Spring with its
familiar rosebuds, the wrong beds,
the wrong graves, wars
unremembered & boundaries gained
only to be lost & lost
again
& lost roses whose lost
petals
reminded poets to
carpe, carpe
diem
with whoever’s wife
or husband happened to
be handiest!
O Turmoil & Confusion—
you are my Muses!
O longing for a world
without death, without beds
divided by walls between houses!
All the beds float out to sea!
All the dying lovers wave
to the other dying lovers!
One of them writes on his mistress’s skin as he floats.
He is the poet.
Not for this
will his life be spared.
Looking for a place
where we might turn off
the inner dialogue,
the monologue
of futures & regrets,
of pasts not past enough
& futures that may never come
to pass,
we found this boat
bobbing in the blue,
this refuge amid reefs,
this white hull
within this azure sibilance of sea,
this central rocking
so like the rocking
before birth.
Venus was born of the waters,
borne over them
to teach us about love—
our only sail
on the seas of our lives
as death is
our only anchor.
If we return again & again
to the sea
both in our dreams
& for our love affairs
it is because
this element alone
understands our pasts
& futures
as she makes them
one.
Male?
Female?
God doesn’t care
about sex
& the long tree-shaded avenue
toward death.
God says
the worm is as beautiful
as the apple it eats
& the apple as lovely
as the thick trunk
of the tree,
& the trunk of the tree
no more beautiful
than the air
surrounding it.
God doesn’t care
about the battle
between the sexes
with which we amuse ourselves
on our way toward death.
God says:
there are no sexes;
& still we amuse ourselves
arguing about whether or not
She is male
or He
female.
for Ben Barber
After the college
reading,
the eager
students gather.
They ask me
what you need
to be a writer
& I, feeling flippant,
jaunty
(because
I am wearing
an 18th century dress
& think
myself in love
again),
answer:
“Mazel,
determination,
talent,
& true
grit.”
I even
believe it—
looking
as I do
like an
advertisement
for easy
success—
designer dress,
sly smile
on my lips
& silver boots
from
Oz.
Suppose
they saw me
my eyes
swollen
like sponges,
my hand
shaking
with betrayal,
my fear
rampant
in the dark?
Suppose they saw
the fear
of never
writing,
the fear
of being
alone,
the money fear,
the fear fear,
the fear
of succumbing
to fear?
& then
there’s all
I did
not say:
to be
a writer
what you need
is
something
to say:
something
that burns
like a hot coal
in your gut
something
that pounds
like a pump
in your groin
& the courage
to love
like a wound
that never
heals.
You gave me the child
that seamed my belly
& stitched up my life.
You gave me: one book of love poems,
five years of peace
& two of pain.
You gave me darkness, light, laughter
& the certain knowledge
that we someday die.
You gave me seven years
during which the cells of my body
died & were reborn.
Now we have died
into the limbo of lost loves,
that wreckage of memories
tarnishing with time,
that litany of losses
which grows longer with the years,
as more of our friends
descend underground
& the list of our loved dead
outstrips the list of the living.
Knowing as we do
our certain doom,
knowing as we do
the rarity of the gifts we gave
& received,
can we redeem
our love from the limbo,
dust it off like a fine sea trunk
found in an attic
& now more valuable
for its age & rarity
than a shining new one?
Probably not.
This page is spattered
with tears that streak the words