Becoming Light (20 page)

lose, losses, limbo.

I stand on a ledge in hell

still howling for our love.

If you come back

now

before the roadblocks

are too many,

before too many bodies

are stacked

between us,

before the demilitarized zone

fills up with the mud

of betrayal,

& counter-betrayal,

we may still find

it in our hearts

to trust each other.

We may still find

it in our bodies

to fit together.

We may still find

that our minds

curl around the same

jokes and rejoice

in the same

hijinks.

But if we wait

till the bodies pile up

to the sky,

till the blood

dries in the muddy trench,

we may just find

that it turns

to pale powder

& blows away.

For we know that

love can dry up

as surely as arroyos

were once raging rivers,

as surely as swamps

are deserts now,

as surely as oceans

turn to sand.

I do not fear

the blood

as much as I fear

its drying

until the smallest breath

can blow

our love, our dreams,

our mingled flesh

away.

There is only one story:

he loved her,

then stopped loving her,

while she did not

stop loving him.

There is only one story:

she loved him,

then stopped loving him,

while he did not

stop loving her.

The truth is simple:

you do not die

from love.

You only wish

you did.

My love is too much—

it embarrasses you—

blood, poems, babies,

red needs that telephone

from foreign countries,

black needs that spatter

the pages

of your white papery heart.

You would rather have a girl

with simpler needs:

lunch, sex, undemanding

loving,

dinner, wine, bed,

the occasional blow-job

& needs that are never

red as gaping wounds

but cool & blue

as television screens

in tract houses.

Oh my love,

those simple girls

with simple needs

read my books too.

They tell me they feel

the same as I do.

They tell me I transcribe

the language of their hearts.

They tell me I translate

their mute, unspoken pain

in the white light

of language.

Oh love,

no love

is ever wholly undemanding.

It can pretend coolness

until the pain comes,

until the first baby comes,

howling her own infant need

into a universe

that never summoned her.

The love you seek

cannot be found

except in the white pages

of recipe books.

It is cooking you seek,

not love,

cooking with sex coming after,

cool sex

that speaks to the penis alone,

& not the howling chaos

of the heart.

Is God the one who eats the meat off the bones of dead people?

—Molly Miranda Jong-Fast, age 3½

God is the one,

Molly,

whether we call him

Him

or Her,

tree form or spewing

volcano,

Vesuvius or vulva,

penis-rock,

or reindeer-on-cave-wall,

God is the one

who eats

our meat,

Molly,

& we yield

our meat

up willingly.

Meat is our

element,

meat is our

lesson.

When our bodies fill

with each other,

when our blood swells

in our organs

aching for another,

body of meat,

heart of meat,

soul of meat,

we are only doing

what God wants

us to—

meat joining meat

to become insubstantial air,

meat fusing

with meat

to make

a small wonder

like you.

The wonder of you

is that you push

our questions

along into

the future—

so that I know

again

the wonder of meat

through you,

the wonder of meat

turning to philosophy,

the wonder of meat

transubstantiated

into poetry,

the wonder of

sky-blue meat

in your roundest eyes,

the wonder of

dawn-colored meat

in your cheeks & palms,

the wonder of meat

becoming

air.

You

are my theorem,

my proof,

my meaty metaphysics,

my little questioner,

my small Socrates

of the nursery-schoolyard.

To think that

such wonder

can come from meat!

Well then,

if God is hungry—

let Him eat,

let Her eat.

“Why do you

have stripes

in your forehead,

Mama?

Are you

old?”

Not old.

But not so

young

that I cannot

see

the world contracting

upon itself

& the circle

closing at the end.

As the furrows

in my brow

deepen,

I can see

myself

sinking back

into that childhood

street

I walked along

with my grandfather,

thinking he was old

at sixty-three

since I was four,

as you are four

to my

forty.

Forty years

to take

the road out.

Will another forty

take me

back?

Back to the street

I grew up on,

back to

my mother’s breast,

back to the second

world war

of a second

child,

back

to the cradle

endlessly

rocking?

I am young

as
you
are,

Molly—

yet with stripes

in my brow;

I earn my youth

as you must earn

your age.

These stripes

are decorations

for my valor—

forty years

of marching

to a war

I could not declare,

our locate,

yet have somehow

won.

Now,

I begin

to unwin,

unraveling

the sleeves

of care

that have

stitched up

this brow,

unraveling

the threads

that have kept

me scared,

as I pranced

over the world,

seemingly fearless,

working

without a net,

knowing

if I fell

it would

only be

into that same

childhood street,

where I dreaded

to tread

on the lines—

not knowing

the lines

would someday

tread

on me,

Molly,

when you are forty,

read this poem

& tell me:

have we won

or lost

the war?

(Elegy for my grandfather who painted the sea & horses)

A dream of fantastic horses

galloping out of the sea,

the sea itself a dream,

a dream of green on green,

an age of indolence

where one-celled animals

blossom, once more, into limbs,

brains, pounding hooves,

out of the terrible innocence

of the waves.

Venice on the crest

of hell’s typhoon,

sunami of my dreams

when, all at once,

I wake at three a.m.

in a tidal wave of love & sleeplessness,

anxiety & dread.

Up from the dream,

up on the shining white ledge of dread—

I dredge the deep

for proof that we do not die,

for proof that love

is a seawall against despair,

& find only

the one-celled dreams

dividing & dividing

as in the primal light.

O my grandfather,

you who painted the sea

so obsessively,

you who painted horses

galloping, galloping

out of the sea—

go now,

ride on the bare back

of the unsaddled,

unsaddleable horse

who would take you

straight to hell.

Gallop on the back

of all my nightmares;

dance in the foam

in a riot of hooves

& let the devil paint you

with his sea-green brush;

let him take you

into the waves at last,

until you fall,

chiming forever,

through the seaweed bells,

lost like the horses of San Marco,

but not for good.

Down through the hulls

of gelatinous fish,

down through the foamless foam

which coats your bones,

down through the undersea green

which changes your flesh

into pure pigment,

grinding your eyes down

to the essential cobalt blue.

Let the bones of my poems

support what is left of you—

ashes & nightmares,

canvasses half-finished & fading worksheets.

O my grandfather,

as you die,

a poem forms on my lips,

as foam forms

on the ocean’s morning mouth,

& I sing in honor of the sea & you—

the sea who defies all paintings

& all poems

& you

who defy

the sea.

From
Loveroot
by Erica Jong

Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

To Pablo Neruda

Dear Colette

Dear Marys, Dear Mother, Dear Daughter (originally published as Mary, Mary)

Elegy for a Whale

For My Sister, Against Narrowness

For My Husband

Cheever’s People

Dear Anne Sexton, I

Dear Anne Sexton, II

Dearest Man-in-the-Moon

Dear Keats

Becoming a Nun

Empty

Egyptology

Parable of the Four-Poster

Tapestry, with Unicorn

The Poet Writes in
I

Sunjuice

Insomnia and Poetry

Copyright © 1977 by Erica Mann Jong

From
How to Save Your Own Life
by Erica Mann Jong

Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

The Puzzle

The Long Tunnel of Wanting You

The Muse Who Came to Stay

We Learned

Doubts Before Dreaming

The Dirty Laundry Poem

Sailing Home

Living Happily Ever After

The Surgery of the Sea

After the Earthquake

Copyright © 1981 by Erica Mann Jong

From
Witches
by Erica Jong

Reprinted by permission of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

To the Goddess

To the Horned God

Figure of the Witch

Baby-Witch

How to Name Your Familiar

Her Broom, or the Ride of the Witch

Love Magick

Bitter Herb

For All Those Who Died

A Deadly Herbal in Verse (Mandrake, Henbane, Thorn Apple, Deadly Nightshade, Monkshood)

E
RICA
J
ONG
is an award-winning poet, novelist, and memoirist, and one of the nation’s most distinctive voices on women and sexuality. She has won many literary awards: the Bess Hokin Prize from
Poetry
magazine (also awarded to Sylvia Plath and W. S. Merwin); a National Endowment for the Arts award; the first Fernanda Pivano Award in Italy (named for the critic who introduced Ernest Hemingway, Allen Ginsberg, and Erica Jong herself to the Italian public); the Sigmund Freud Award for Literature, also it Italy; the United Nations Award for Excellence in Literature; and the Deauville Award for Literary Excellence in France.

Raised by artists in the intellectual melting pot of New York’s Upper West Side, Jong graduated from the High School of Music & Art and Barnard College, where she majored in writing and Italian literature. She then completed a Master’s degree in eighteenth-century English literature at Columbia (1965) and began PhD studies. She first attracted serious attention as a poet, publishing her debut volume,
Fruits & Vegetables
, in 1971 and her second,
Half-Lives
, in 1973.

Also in 1973, she published the book for which she is best known. Partially drawing on Jong’s early life, as well as her wild imagination,
Fear of Flying
, hailed by John Updike as the female answer to
Portnoy’s Complaint
and
The Catcher in the Rye
, is about a woman trying to find herself and learn how to fly free of her repressions. Isadora Wing seeks to discover her soul and her sexuality, and in the process, she delves into erotic fantasy and experimentation, shocking many critics—but delighting readers.

While the book’s explicitness inevitably drew controversy, the novel has endured because of its psychological depth and wild humor. Its heroine, Isadora Wing, whose quest for liberation and happiness struck a chord with many readers, galvanized them to change their lives. The novel gathered momentum, eventually landing on top of the
New York Times
bestseller list. It has since sold over twenty-six million copies in forty languages. It has been as beloved in Asia, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and South America as in North America, and has been written about, studied, and taught in universities.