Becoming Light

Poems New and Selected

Erica Jong

To

keeper of my flame

Time is what keeps the light

from reaching us.

—Meister Eckhart

seven lives,

then we

become light…

Contents

Preface

I New Poems

Lullabye for a Dybbuk

Ode to My Shoes

Alphabet Poem: To the Letter I

Demeter at Dusk

The Impressionists

To My Brother Poet, Seeking Peace

My Daughter Says

Driving Me Away

The Land of Fuck

Middle Aged Lovers, I

The Rain Is My Home

The Raspberries in My Driveway

In the Glass-Bottomed Boat

Pane Caldo

Nota in una Bottiglia

To a Transatlantic Mirror

Middle Aged Lovers, II

Gazing Out, Gazing In

The Demon Lover

In My Cauldron Under the Full Moon

I Sit at My Desk Alone

Love Spell: Against Endings

Beast, Book, Body

The Whole Point

The Color of Snow

The Bed of the World

II Early Poems

Venice, November, 1966

For an Earth-Landing

Still Life with Tulips

Ritratto

The Perfect Poet

Autumn Perspective

The Nazi Amphitheatre

By Train from Berlin

Near the Black Forest

The Artist as an Old Man

The Catch

At the Museum of Natural History

To James Boswell in London

Death of a Romantic

Eveningsong at Bellosguardo

On Sending You a Lock of My Hair

In Defense of the English Portrait School

To X. (With Ephemeral Kisses)

The Lives of the Poets: Three Profiles

III From Fruits & Vegetables (1971)

Fruits & Vegetables

The Man Under the Bed

Walking Through the Upper East Side

Here Comes

The Commandments

Aging

In Sylvia Plath Country

A Reading

Imaginary Landscapes

The Saturday Market

The Heidelberg Landlady

Student Revolution

Flying You Home

Books

IV From Half-Lives (1973)

The Evidence

Seventeen Warnings in Search of a Feminist Poem

Divorce

Paper Cuts

Alcestis on the Poetry Circuit

Mother

The Eggplant Epithalamion

Touch

Gardener

The Prisoner

The Other Side of the Page

V From Loveroot (1975)

To Pablo Neruda

Dear Colette

Dear Marys, Dear Mother, Dear Daughter

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 & Poetry

VI From How to Save Your Own Life (1977)

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

VII From Witches (1981)

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

VIII From At the Edge of the Body (1979)

At the Edge of the Body

Self-Portrait in Shoulder Stand

My Death

Zen & the Art of Poetry

The Xylophone of the Spine

Aura

The Keys

The Poetry Suit

The Buddha in the Womb

Without Parachutes

If God Is a Dog

Best Friends

The Exam Dream

His Tuning of the Night

The Deaths of the Goddesses

The Truce Between the Sexes

Depression in Early Spring

Blood & Honey

Woman Enough

Assuming Our Dominance

House-Hunting in the Bicentennial Year

January in New York

New England Winter

Jubilate Canis

I Live in New York

Flight to Catalina

Good Carpenters

People Who Live

Unrequited

Summoning the Muse to a New House

IX From Ordinary Miracles (1983)

Ordinary Miracles

The Birth of the Water Baby

Another Language

Anti-Conception

Perishable Women

Anti-Matter

Nursing You

On Reading a Vast Anthology

This Element

On the Avenue

What You Need to Be a Writer

Letter to My Lover After Seven Years

If You Come Back

There Is Only One Story

My Love Is Too Much

For Molly, Concerning God

Poem for Molly’s Fortieth Birthday

The Horse from Hell

A Biography of Erica Jong

Preface

IT WAS IN HONOR of the birthday of Edward Lear that an editor at the New York Times Magazine asked me to write something commemorating the versifier who perfected the smile in the sneer known as a limerick. I wrote a limerick for Edward Lear and then this “Epitaph for Myself.”

A demi-young author named Jong

Became famous for reasons quite wrong.

A poet at heart, she won fame as a tart—

That mispronounced poet called Jong.

That fugitive piece of doggerel was my way of dealing with the absurdity of my public persona. I had begun literary life as a poet and poetry was still the most important thing I did—even in a world of prose. My novels and essays were essentially a poet’s novels and essays—besotted with language and filled with my visual and visceral delight in words. Somehow, in a culture where everyone is alloted no more than a thirty-second sound byte, I had become Erica “Zipless Fuck” Jong. But that never meant that I bought the package. On the contrary, it was my poetry that kept me sane, that kept me whole, that kept me alive.

Poetry, however, is not easy to midwife into the world. Most publishers don’t want it (I will always be grateful to Gladys Justin Carr, William Shinker, and the other true booklovers at HarperCollins for being the exceptions that prove the rule) and most bookstores and review media ignore it. Nevertheless, at the climactic moments of our lives—death of a loved one, heartbreak, new love, the birth of a baby—we turn to poetry, and nothing else will do.

“Poetry is the honey of all flowers; the quintessence of all sciences…the marrow of wit…the very phrase of angels,” said Thomas Nashe, Shakespeare’s contemporary, in 1592. And so it still remains. Every funeral, every wedding, every honeymoon (married or not), every bris or christening is an occasion for poetry—and even in this epoch of sound bytes and MTV, people dig through tattered anthologies to find the fitting words.

Why is this? Because poetry comforts as nothing else can and because, apparently, we are still a race for whom magic is a word. The incantation both propitiates and validates the event. Since flesh can’t stay, we pass the words along.

These poems are the few I have chosen to save from my five published volumes of poetry, my second novel which contains a coda in verse, and my book on witches and witchcraft. (It will come as no surprise to my readers that I have been trying to blend genres from the beginning.) There is also a large complement of new poems and a series of early, previously unpublished poems which date back to my teens and twenties. Disowned when I published Fruits & Vegetables (in part because they betray my origins as a more formal poet who loved rhyme and meter), I am now ready to own them again. I started life as a poet, and a formal poet at that. It took maturity to let me love Whitman, Dickinson, and Allen Ginsberg. At last I am ready to own both my free and my metered sides.

My deepest thanks to Jay Parini, Gladys Justin Carr, and Tom Miller for helping me edit thirty years of poetry into one manageable volume; to Lavinia Lorch for shaping my English to an Italian cadence (in Nota in una Bottiglia); to my parents for reading me poetry when I was little; and to my daughter for loving to have that tradition passed along.

For that is what poetry is: a passing along.

Inevitably, these poems form a sort of autobiography in verse. I hope they are the reader’s autobiography as well as the writer’s.

Erica Jong

Weston, Connecticut

May 1991

I

NEW POEMS

Lullaby for a Dybbuk

The old self

like a dybbuk

clutching at my heel.

She wants to come back.

She is digging

her long red nails

into the tender meat of my thighs…

She tweaks my clit,

hoping that my sexaholic self

will surface

and take me back, back, back

to the land of fuck,

where, crazed with lust

I come over and over again,

going nowhere.

The old self

does not like

her displacement.

She resents the new tenant

sprucing up

her disorderly house.

She resents

the calm woman

nourishing her roses,

her daughter, her dogs,

her poems, her passionate

friendships.

She wants chaos

and angst and Liebestod.

She claims

she can’t write

without them.

But the new tenant

is wise to her tricks.

Disorder is not poetry,

she says. Pain

is not love.

Love flowers; love gives

without taking;

love is serene

and calm.

I talk to the dybbuk:

My darling dybbuk,

I will love you

into submission.

Tweak me, I will only

caress you.

Claw me, I will only

kiss you back.

For what I have learned

lets me love

even my demon.

Demon—I love you

for you are

mine,

I say.

And demons die

of love.

Ode to My Shoes

(After Neruda, who left us his socks)

The poet alone

is writing an ode

to her shoes—

her shoes which

only she can fill,

her shoes of purple suede and green leather

the color of palm fronds,

her diamond-studded boots,

her feathered cowboy boots,

her flame cowboy boots,

her seven-league epic poetry boots,

her little silver haiku boots

with the tiny heels that twinkle,

her first-person platform boots

and her backless glass slippers

modelled after Cinderella’s

(one lost, at midnight,

because of a running man),

her huntress boots of India-rubber,

her lover’s boots joined at the ankle

like leg irons,

her pink baby booties bronzed

for posterity,

her daughter’s burning Reeboks,

her lover’s laceless sneakers

left in the guest room closet

for her to kiss

year after year

after year.

Darling shoes,

beloved feet,

ten toes to walk me

toward my true love,

fuck-me pumps to fuel his passion,

stiletto heels to stab him

if he strays.

Shoes tell you everything.

Shoes speak my language.

Their tap taptap on the airport runway

tells me the story

of a lovely, lonely woman flying after love—

that old, old story

in a new pair

of shoes.

Alphabet Poem: To the Letter I

I, io, ich, yo, Я,

uppercase, lowercase,

sometimes confused with love

which starts with L,

but could easily be I,

with a foot,

a pseudopod facing the future,

or at least the righthand

margin of the page—

all we know of life

and all we need

to know.

The poet must abolish I,

said Keats;

have no identity,

be as water flowing

around a rock—

a voice for all

the unsaid waves within,

antenna of the deep.

“Here lies one whose name

was writ in water,”

he would have graven

on his gravestone

had he but world enough

and time—

but the harpstring broke,

and his dearest friends

would not deny his I—

(they could not

for they still believed

themselves).

Ich, I, io, yo, Я

turned from lettres majuscules

to minuscule

by Cummings

(ee, I mean)

to droplets of vapor

condensed along a blade

of grass

(by Whitman),

to Blake’s tiger,

to Dickinson’s

buzzing fly…

(we so insist

on having names,

then die).

For the poet

whoever he (or she)

may be

is always

beneath the violets

singing like wind

or water.

To become a natural thing,

eye of the cosmos,

sans i’s, sans teeth,

sans everything,

to see the rock,

the hand, the water,

rippling around

the thrown pebble

as part of the same art,

the art of the possible,

life passing into death

and death to life—

poetry not politics.

The abolition of the I,

eye, eye,

the end of i,

so that even the dot

becomes a flyspeck,

Morse code

of infinity…

The alphabet is

poetry’s DNA;

what sperm and egg

are to our progeny,

the alphabet

is to the poet,

germ-cells,

single, yet dividing

like a zygote,

characters

encompassing

the world.

We are all one poet

and always

we have one

communal name,

god’s name, nameless,

a flame in the heart,

a breath,

a gust of air,

prana whistling in the dark.

i dies—

but the breath

lingers on

through the medium

of the magic

alphabet

and in its wake

death is no more

than metaphor.

Demeter at Dusk

At dusk Demeter

becomes afraid

for baby Persephone

lost in that hell

which she herself created

with her love.

Excess of love—

the woman’s curse,

the curse of loving

that which causes pain,

the curse of bringing forth

in pain,

the curse of bearing,

bearing always pain.

Demeter pauses, listening for her child—

this fertile goddess

with her golden hair, bringing forth

wheat and fruit and wildflowers

knee-high.

This apple-breasted goddess

whose sad eyes

will bless the frozen world,

bring spring again—

all because she once

walked through the night

and loved a man, half-demon,

angel-tongued,

who gave her

everything she needed to be wise:

a daughter,

hell’s black night,

then endless

spring.

The Impressionists

They conspired to paint the air

knowing that art

is not only a way

of seeing

but a way

of being,

a passion for the light,

a tenderness at heart

just short

of being wounded by the air,

a toughness too.

They conspired to paint the air,

to anatomize each light mote,

to imprism each speck of dust

until the air danced with color

and every inhaled breath

became a rainbow in the lungs.

Jasmine, tea leaf, camellia,

tuberose and thyme—the air

turning to color, the color

bleeding into earth, the

earth giving forth its forms,

its fossils, its sexual smells,

then closing over all.

They conspired to paint the air,

leaving their mark,

an obsessed life,

infinitely rich,

infinitely ripe,

tasting of peaches

and anemones,

red tile,

voile peignoirs

and air,

inhabited air.

To My Brother Poet, Seeking Peace

People wish to be settled. Only as long as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

—Thoreau

My life has been

the instrument

for a mouth

I have never seen,

breathing wind

which comes

from I know not

where,

arranging and changing

my moods,

so as to make

an opening

for his voice.

Or hers.

Muse, White Goddess

mother with invisible

milk,

androgynous god

in whose grip

I struggle,

turning this way and that,

believing that I chart

my life,

my loves,

when in fact

it is she, he,

who charts them—

all for the sake

of some

as yet unwritten poem.

Twisting in the wind,

twisting like a pirate

dangling in a cage

from a high seawall,

the wind whips

through my bones

making an instrument,

my back a xylophone,

my sex a triangle

chiming,

my lips stretched tight

as drumskins,

I no longer care

who is playing me,

but fear

makes the hairs

stand up

on the backs

of my hands

when I think

that she may stop.

And yet I long

for peace

as fervently as you do—

the sweet connubial bliss

that admits no

turbulence,

the settled life

that defeats poetry,

the hearth before which

children play—

not poets’ children,

ragtag, neurotic, demon-ridden,

but the apple-cheeked children

of the bourgeoisie.

My daughter dreams

of peace

as I do:

marriage, proper house,

proper husband,

nourishing dreamless

sex,

love like a hot toddy,

or an apple pie.

But the muse

has other plans

for me

and you.

Puppet mistress,

dangling us

on this dark proscenium,

pulling our strings,

blowing us

toward Cornwall,

toward Venice, toward Delphi,

toward some lurching

counterpane,

a tent upheld

by one throbbing

blood-drenched pole—

her pen, her pencil,

the monolith

we worship,

underneath

the gleaming moon.

My Daughter Says

My daughter says

she feels like a martian,

that no one understands her,

that one friend is too perfect,

and another too mean,

and that she has

the earliest bedtime

in her whole class.

I strain to remember

how a third grader feels

about love, about pain

and I feel a hollow in my heart

where there should be blood

and an ache where there should

be certainty.

My darling Molly,

no earthling ever lived

who did not feel

like a Martian,

who did not curse her bedtime,

who did not wonder

how she got to this planet,

who dropped her here

and why

and how she can possibly

stay.

I go to bed

whenever I like

and with whomever I choose,

but still I wonder

why I do not

belong in my class,

and where my class is anyway,

and why so many of them

seem to be asleep

while I toss and turn

in perplexity.

They, meanwhile, imagine I am perfect

and have solved everything:

an earthling among the Martians,

at home on her home planet,

feet planted in green grass.

If only we could all admit

that none of us belongs here,

that all of us are Martians,

and that our bedtimes

are always

too early

or

too late.

Driving Me Away

Driving me away

is easier

than saying

goodbye—

kissing the air,

the last syllable

of truth

being always

two lips compressed

around

emptiness—

the emptiness

you dread

yet return to

as just punishment,

just reward.

Who

loved you

so relentlessly?

Who lost you

in that howling void

between infancy

and death?

It is punctuated

by the warm bodies

of women,

who hold you for a while

then run

down that echoing corridor,

doing

as they are told.

The Land of Fuck

Here I was begging the Muse not to get me in trouble with the powers that be, not to make me write out all those “filthy” words…pointing out in that deaf and dumb language which I employed when dealing with the Voice that soon…I would have to write my books in Jail or at the foot of the gallows…and these holy cows deep in clover render a verdict of guilty, guilty of dreaming it up “to make money”!

—Henry Miller

The land of fuck

is not for sale.

Caught between

the muslin curtains

of the nursery

and the red damask

of the whorehouse,

the gambling den,

the mafia chieftains’

restaurant

(in whose backroom the big men

with big bellies,

big guns,

and little dicks

gamble lives

away

on a flipped card

or a throw

of bones)—

the land of fuck

is not for sale.

You can steal it

if you dare.

In a dream

you can ascend

to that special room

above the shadowy El

where, amid the rattling trains

carrying bug-eyed

exhibitionists

and drooling

adolescent boys

with perpetual

hard-ons,

the students of Fuck

go to spill their lives away

and the semen pools

under their luminous chairs.

The land of fuck

is not for sale

any more than

the sea is,

and it smells the same.

Ocean wreckage

at low tide: salt and rot

and sea meat left in the sun

too long,

sweet slime

between epochs of bone

and dust.

The land of fuck

is not for sale—

which does not mean

it has no price.

The tax

is tranquility, calm,

and the stillness of life.

The land of fuck

has a price.

Middle Aged Lovers, I

Unable to bear

the uncertainty

of the future,

we consulted seers,

mediums, stock market gurus,

psychics who promised

happiness on this

or another planet,

astrologists of love,

seekers of the Holy Grail.

Looking for certainty

we asked for promises,

lover’s knots, pledges, rings,

certificates, deeds of ownership,

when it was always enough

to let your hand

pass over my body,

your eyes find the depths of my own,

and the wind pass over our faces

as it will pass

through our bones,

sooner than we think.

The current is love,

is poetry,

the blood beat

in the thighs,

the electrical charge

in the brain.

Our long leap

into the unknown

began nearly

a half century ago

and is almost

over.

I think of the

amphorae of stored honey

at Paestum

far out-lasting

their Grecian eaters,

or of the furniture

in a pharaoh’s tomb

on which

no one sits.

Trust the wind,

my lover,

and the water.

They have the

answers

to all your questions

and mine.

The Rain Is My Home

All my life

I have resented

umbrellas:

middle child

defying the rain,

seeing rainbows

in the parachutes of grey

that collapse over our heads

on rainy days,

I skip in the shiny streets

hearing the songs in the tires,

and loving the sound

of the rain.

Long before I surrendered

to my fate,

I surrendered

to the rain—

a fugue by Bach

raining softly on my head

teaching me fearlessness.

Reader: I give you

this rain.

The Raspberries in My Driveway

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eyes level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

—Thoreau

The raspberries

in my driveway

have always

been here

(for the whole eleven years

I have owned

but have not owned

this house),

yet

I have never

tasted them

before.

Always on a plane.

Always in the arms

of man, not God,

always too busy,

too fretful,

too worried

to see

that all along

my driveway

are red, red raspberries

for me to taste.

Shiny and red,

without hairs—

unlike the berries

from the market.

Little jewels—

I share them

with the birds!

On one perches

a tiny green insect.

I blow her off.

She flies!

I burst the raspberry

upon my tongue.

In my solitude

I commune

with raspberries,

with grasses,

with the world.

The world was always

there before,

but where

was I?

Ah raspberry—

if you are so beautiful

upon my ready tongue,

imagine

what wonders

lie in store

for me!

In the Glass-Bottomed Boat

In the glass-bottomed boat

of our lives, we putter along

gazing at that other world

under the sea—

that world of flickering

yellow-tailed fish,

of deadly moray eels, of sea urchins

like black stars

that devastate great brains

of coral,

of fish the color

of blue neon,

& fish the color

of liquid silver

made by Indians

exterminated

centuries ago.

We pass, we pass,

always looking down.

The fish do not

look up at us,

as if they knew

somehow

their world

for the eternal one,

ours for

the merely time-bound.

The engine sputters.

Our guide—a sweet

black boy with skin

the color of molten chocolate—

asks us of the price of jeans

& karate classes

in the States.

Surfboards too

delight him—

& skateboards.

He wants to sail, sail, sail,

not putter

through the world.

& so do we,

so do we,

wishing for the freedom

of the fish

beneath the reef,

wishing for the crevices

of sunken ship

with its rusted eyeholes,

its great ribbed hull,

its rotted rudder,

its bright propeller

tarnishing beneath the sea.

“They sunk this ship

on purpose,”

says our guide—

which does not surprise

us,

knowing how life

always imitates

even the shabbiest

art.

Our brains forged

in shark & seawreck epics,

we fully expect to see

a wreck like this one,

made on purpose

for our eyes.

But the fish swim on,

intimating death,

intimating outer space,

& even the oceans

within the body

from which we come.

The fish are uninterested

in us.

What hubris to think

a shark concentrates

as much on us

as we on him!

The creatures of the reef

spell death, spell life,

spell eternity,

& still we putter on

in our leaky little boat,

halfway there,

halfway there.

Pane Caldo

Rising in the morning

like warm bread,

from a bed

in America,

the aroma

of my baking

reaches you

in Italy,

rocking in your boat

near the Ponte Longo,

cutting through the glitter

of yesterday’s moonlight

on your sunstruck

canal.

My delicious baker—

it is you

who have made

this hot bread

rise.

It is you

who have split the loaf

and covered it with the butter.

I prayed to the moon

streaking the still lagoon

with her skyblue manna;

I prayed for you

to sail into my life,

parting the waters,

making them whole.

And here you come,

half captain, half baker—

& the warm aroma of bread

crosses

the ocean

we share.

Nota in una Bottiglia

Mandando una lettera

da New York a Venezia

da amante ad amante,

da Inglese Americano

ad Italiano Veneziano,

e come mandare

una nota in una bottiglia

da un mare

ad un altro,

da una galassia

ad un altra,

da un epoca

ad un altra,

scirolando per creppacci

nello spazio.

Mio amante

così lontano

eppure. Qui

dentro alia mia anima,

quando respire

al telefono,

un canale

si apre

nel mio cuore,

un canale chiaro

in quell mondo scintillante,

dove ci cullavamo

in una barca

amandoci,

sapendoci parte

della danza

del mare.

E tutt’ uno.

La barca

abbracciata dall’ acqua

e i corpi nostril

abbracciati l’uno

all’ altro,

e la luce del sole

strisciando il mare

finchè il plenilunio

lo colma,

e nel tondo della luna

nasce il nostro amore.

L’amore ci guarisce

perchè ci ricorda

l’integrità

che abbiamo perso

nella nostra lotta

contro noi stessi.

E in questa bottiglia

ti mando quella integrità

e il mare la solleva

e la lascia cader

giù.

La luna e la nostra postina

Porterà il messaggio.

Io aspetto sulla spiaggia

il suo sorgere.

Rendo questo scintillio

nelle sue mani

capaci.

To a Transatlantic Mirror

When we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door…

—Suzuki

Sick of the self,

the self-seducing self—

with its games, its fears,

its misty memories, and its prix fixe menu

of seductions (so familiar

even to the seducer)

that he grows sick

of looking at himself

in the mirrored ceiling

before he takes the plunge into this new

distraction from the self

which in fact leads back

to self.

Self—the prison.

Love—the answer and the door.

And yet the self should also be a door,

swinging, letting loves both in and out,

for change

is the world’s only fixity, and fixity

her foremost lie.

How to trust love

which has so often

betrayed the betrayer,

seduced the seducer,

and then turned out

to be not even love?

We are jaded,

divorced from our selves

without ever having found

ourselves—and yet we

long for wholeness

if not fixity,

for harmony

if not music of the spheres.

If life is a flood

and there is no ark,

then where do the animals float

two by two?

I refuse to believe

that the flesh falls

from their bones

without understanding

ever coming,

and I refuse to believe

that we must leave

this life entirely alone.

Much harrumphing

across the ocean,

my brother poet coughs,

clears his throat

(he smokes too much),

and gazes into the murky

depths of his word-processor,

as if it were a crystal ball.

I do not know

all that hides

in his heart of darkness

but I know I love

the thoughts

that cloud the surface

of his crystal ball.

He longs to leap

headlong into his future

and cannot.

This chapter’s finished,

his self peels back

a skin.

Snakes hiss,

shedding their scales.

The goddess smiles.

She sends her missives

only to the brave.

Middle Aged Lovers, II

You open to me

a little,

then grow afraid

and close again,

a small boy

fearing to be hurt,

a toe stubbed

in the dark,

a finger cut

on paper.

I think I am free

of fears,

enraptured, abandoned

to the call

of the Bacchae,

my own siren,

tied to my own

mast,

both Circe

and her swine.

But I too

am afraid:

I know where

life leads.

The impulse

to join,

to confess all,

is followed

by the impulse

to renounce,

and love—

imperishable love—

must die,

in order

to be reborn.

We come

to each other

tentatively,

veterans of other

wars,

divorce warrants

in our hands

which we would beat

into blossoms.

But blossoms

will not withstand

our beatings.

We come

to each other

with hope

in our hands—

the very thing

Pandora kept

in her casket

when all the ills

and woes of the world

escaped.

Gazing Out, Gazing In

(to my lover gazing out the window)

Because I am here

anchoring you

to the passionate darkness,

you gaze out the window

at the light.

My love is the thing

that frees you

to follow your eyes,

as your love,

a sword made of moonlight

and blood,

and smelling of sex

and salt marshes,

frees me to gaze

with a calm inward

eye.

In all your frenzied searching

you never stood

calmly at the window.

But now the sea,

the city and the sky

are all seen

as if from a perch

at the edge of the cosmos,

where I sit behind you

gazing

at the fire.

The Demon Lover

Unable to bear the falsehoods—

the girls calling up

each time you came

to my bed—

I fled

and now I dream of you

knowing you are

dreaming of me,

knowing we will always be

each other’s muse, forbidden lover,

witch and warlock

joined by a filament of flesh,

lover through the looking glass.

I dream of you

as the witch

beside her husband’s hearth

dreams of the grandmaster

of the coven,

dreams of burning stones

that sting the flesh,

while her good husband

strokes her rump,

muttering words

of tame domestic love.

You are my demon,

the devil in my flesh,

the wild child,

the boy with eyes of flame,

the bad seed I took

into my body,

the infected needle

I craved

more deeply

than health.

On every seashore

I see you waving your arms

out of the whitecaps

as you drown

only to be reborn

in the foam

between my legs.

In every bed

you appear, sexual dybbuk,

mocking my lovers

with your twinkling blue eyes

and the crooked cane of your cock

smelling of the pit.

You are trouble, double trouble,

triple trouble,

the wrecker of peace,

but you make

my cauldron boil.

I dream of you always

as I lie

in the sheltering arms

of another.

I dream of you

as the condemned witch

dreams of her end

at the stake,

when, lashed to the burning pole,

she will offer up her flesh

to become smoke,

her hair to become ash,

her soul to be carried away

on the wings of the air,

marrying, marrying, marrying

the final fire.

In My Cauldron Under the Full Moon

In my cauldron

under the full moon

thinking of poppets:

who shall I choose

to join

my life with?

The man of muslin

with the peppermint

heart, bleeding

through his pocket

underneath

the felt-tipped pens?

The man of plastic

listening to jazz

in his blue room?

The sexual robot

with his swiveling

indefatigable cock?

The yearning poet

who would rather yearn

than anything?

The businessman

who thinks poetry

has a bottom line?

The absent daddy

who will only come home

when the flesh

is falling off his bones?

I would

make a poppet, Muse,

but I do not know

how to mark it.

Which astrological sign,

which profession,

which color of hair,

which size and shape of cock?

Witch-woman that I am,

I am baffled

by choices.

Therefore I turn it over

to you,

and your lunar wisdom,

while I wait

in my cauldron

bubbling

under a pregnant

moon.

I Sit at My Desk Alone

I sit at my desk alone

as I did on many Sunday

afternoons when you came

back to me,

your arms aching for me,

though they smelled

of other women

and your sweet head bowed

for me to rub

and your heart bursting

with things to tell me,

and your hair

and your eyes

wild.

We would embrace

on the carpet

and leave

the imprint of our bodies

on the floor.

My back is still sore

where you pressed me

into the rug,

a sweet soreness I would never

lose.

I think of you always

on Sunday afternoons,

and I try to conjure you

with these words—

as if you might

come back to me

at twilight—

but you are never coming back—

never.

The truth is

you no longer exist.

Oh you walk the world

sturdily enough:

one foot in front

of the other.

But the lover you were,

the tender shoot

springing within me,

trusting me with your dreams,

has hardened

into fear and cynicism.

Betrayal does that—

betrays the betrayer.

I want to hate you

and I cannot.

But I cannot

love you either.

It is our old love

I love,

as one loves

certain images

from childhood—

shards

shining in

the street

in the shit.

Shards of light

in the darkness.

Love Spell: Against Endings

All the endings in my life

rise up against me

like that sea of troubles

Shakespeare mixed

with metaphors;

like Vikings in their boats

singing Wagner,

like witches

burning at

the stake—

I submit

to my fate.

I know beginnings,

their sweetnesses,

and endings,

their bitternesses—

but I do not know

continuance—

I do not know

the sweet demi-boredom

of life as it lingers,

of man and wife

regarding each other

across a table of shared witnesses,

of the hand-in-hand dreams

of those who have slept

a half-century together

in a bed so used and familiar

it is rutted

with love.

I would know that

before this life closes,

a soulmate to share my roses—

I would make a spell

with long grey beard hairs

and powdered rosemary and rue,

with the jacket of a tux

for a tall man

with broad shoulders,

who loves to dance;

with one blue contact lens

for his bluest eyes;

with honey in a jar

for his love of me;

with salt in a dish

for his love of sex and skin;

with crushed rose petals

for our bed;

with tubes of cerulean blue

and vermilion and rose madder

for his artist’s-eye;

with a dented Land-Rover fender

for his love of travel;

with a poem by Blake

for his love of innocence

revealed by experience;

with soft rain

and a bare head;

with hand-in-hand dreams on Mondays

and the land of fuck

on Sundays;

with mangoes, papayas

and limes,

and a house towering

above the sea.

Muse, I surrender

to thee.

Thy will be done,

not mine.

If this love spell

pleases you,

send me this lover,

this husband,

this dancing partner

for my empty bed

and let him fill me

from now

until I die.

I offer my bones,

my poems,

my luck with roses,

and the secret garden

I have found

walled in my center,

and the sunflower

who raises her head

despite her heavy seeds.

I am ready now, Muse,

to serve you faithfully

even with

a graceful dancing partner—

for I have learned

to stand alone.

Give me your blessing.

Let the next

epithalamion I write

be my own.

And let it last

more than the years

of my life—

and without the least

strain—

two lovers bareheaded

in a summer rain.

Beast, Book, Body

I was sick of being a woman,

sick of the pain,

the irrelevant detail of sex,

my own concavity

uselessly hungering

and emptier whenever it was filled,

and filled finally

by its own emptiness,

seeking the garden of solitude

instead of men.

The white bed

in the green garden—

I looked forward

to sleeping alone

the way some long

for a lover.

Even when you arrived,

I tried to beat you

away with my sadness,

my cynical seductions,

and my trick of

turning a slave

into a master.

And all because

you made

my fingertips ache

and my eyes cross

in passion

that did not know its own name.

Bear, beast, lover

of the book of my body,

you turned my pages

and discovered

what was there

to be written

on the other side.

And now

I am blank

for you,

a tabula rasa

ready to be printed

with letters

in an undiscovered language

by the great press

of our love.

The Whole Point

—Vermont, August 5, 1989

Erica to Ken

The red and black biplane

swoops down

on the green hills

of Vermont.

A little airstrip

between two mountain ranges,

and people coming

with balloons and streamers,

kites, gliders

and winged wishes.

The bride climbs out

trailing wildflowers,

parachutes, kisses,

and the groom, big beast

with soft eyes that gleam

like butter,

grins, a horny boyscout,

and scoops her

in his arms.

Fearful, I have walked this world

not daring to hope

for the cut half

severed from me

in my last life.

Defiant, I have flown

above my fears, flaunted them

like you, scattering jokes

to drown the sound

of my heart cracking

like winter ice,

and to still

the heckling

of the gallery.

And now you come

to tell me

you know the child

behind the wanton smile

and that you love her

as I know the boy

inside the rough beast

and I can lead him

home.

They marry in a field

of wildflowers

near a pond

whose least ripple

betrays the spirit within.

Intermediate

between earth and sky,

this palimpsest

for the mind of God

has caught the clouds

within its brimming bowl.

Butterflies and hummingbirds

hover nearby.

Deer tiptoe unafraid

on delicate hooves,

and crickets and bullfrogs

chorus.

The red and black biplane

takes off,

banks, turns and flies through

a green notch

in the mountains.

It soars into the blue,

seeming to disappear

into a cloud.

In a little while

it will come back to earth.

Perhaps that is the whole point.

The Color of Snow

For David Karetsky (April 14, 1940–March 12, 1991), killed in an avalanche

Putting the skis down

in the white snow,

the wind singing,

the blizzard of time

going past your eyes,

it is a little

like being snowed in

in the Connecticut house

on a day when the world

goes away

and only the white dog

follows you out

to make fresh tracks

in the long blue shadow

of the mountain.

We are all halfway there,

preferring not

to think about it.

You went down the mountain

first,

in a blaze of light,

reminding us

to seize our lives,

to live with the wind

whistling in our ears,

and the light bedazzling

the tips of our skis

and the people we love

waiting in the lodge below

scribbling lines

on paper the color

of snow,

knowing there is no

holding on

but only the wind singing

and these lines of light

shining

in the fresh snow.

The Bed of the World

The great bed of the world

arching over graves

over Babi Yar

with its multitudes of bones,

with battalions of screams

frozen in a concrete glacier,

with pillows of earth

and comforters of green grass

covering all that dead flesh.

Dead flesh shall live again—

a dream in god’s endless night—

rise green out of the earth

as grass, as trees, as tomato stalks

bearing a bright red fruit

and the feuds of man- and womankind

shall be fed again from the same seeds:

the tomato, the mythic pomegranate, the

biblical apple

all rising from the grass that springs

out of the screams of stopped mouths.

Sometimes I dream

that my bed is built over a ravine,

the ravine of Babi Yar, any ravine

where thousands died

and I moan in pleasure to propitiate the earth,

to make fruit ripen

and trees wave green leaves like banners

all because love can touch me still.

It is never enough to create.

The beast must feed its meat teeth too.

Out of the screaming mouth of earth

we feed the grass that covers

all our beds.

I wish I did not know all that I know.

Galaxies spin, grass grows, and people kill.

We are the only race to murder for our dreams—

and not for hunger,

hungering for dreams.

II

EARLY POEMS

Venice, November, 1966

With his head full of Shakespearean

tempests

and old notions of poetic justice,

he was ready with his elegies

the day the ocean sailed into the square.

“The sea,” he wrote, “is a forgiving element,

and history only the old odor of blood.

She will come to rest on the soft floor

of the world, barnacled like a great pirate

ship,

and blind fish—mouthing like girls before a

glass—

will bump, perhaps, San Marco’s brittle

bones.”

Pleased with these images, he paused

and conjured visions of a wet apocalypse:

the blown church bobbing like a monstrous

water toy,

Doge Dandolo’s bronze horses from

Byzantium

pawing me black waves, incredulous

pigeons

hovering like gulls over the drowning

square,

mosaic saints floating gently to pieces.

Then he waited as the wind rose, as

gondoliers

were rocking in the long furrows of their

boats

and small waves licked the marble lions’

eyes.

But still this most improbable of cities

hung on, lewdly enjoying her own smell.

Learning later how Florence, with her brown

bells,

her dried-up joke of a river, had played

the ark to all his fantasies of flood,

he felt a little foolish. He was walking

in the gallery then, thinking of the doges:

how they tread on clouds which puff and

pucker

like the flesh of their fat Venetian whores;

how thanks to Tintoretto’s shrewd, old eyes,

they saw themselves amid the holy saints;

how shrewd, old Tintoretto, for a price,

painted his patrons into paradise.

For an Earth-Landing

the sky sinks its blue teeth

into the mountains.

Rising on pure will

(the lurch & lift-off,

the sudden swing

into wide, white snow),

I encourage the cable.

Past the wind

& crossed tips of my skis

& the mauve shadows of pines

& the spoor of bears

& deer,

I speak to my fear,

rising, riding,

finding myself

the only thing

between snow & sky,

the link

that holds it all together.

Halfway up the wire,

we stop,

slide back a little

(a whirr of pulleys).

Astronauts circle above us today

in the television blue of space.

But the thin withers of alps

are waiting to take us too,

& this might be the moon!

We move!

Friends, this is a toy

merely for reaching mountains

Merely

for skiing down.

& now we’re dangling

like charms on the same bracelet

or upsidedown tightrope people

(a colossal circus!)

or absurd winged walkers,

angels in animal fur,

with mittened hands waving

& fear turning

& the mountain,

like a fisherman,

reeling us all in.

So we land

on the windy peak,

touch skis to snow,

are married to our purple shadows,

& ski back down

to the unimaginable valley

leaving no footprints.

Still Life with Tulips

Because you did, I too arrange flowers,

Watching the pistils jut like insolent tongues

And the hard, red flesh of the petals

Widening beneath my eyes. They move like

the hands

Of clocks, seeming not to move except

When I turn my gaze; then savagely

In the white room, they billow and spread

Until their redness engulfs me utterly.

Mother, you are far away and claim

In mournful letters that I do not need you;

Yet here in this sunny room, your tulips

Devour me, sucking hungrily

My watery nourishment, filling my house

Like a presence, like an enemy.

Geared to your intervals as the small hand

Of a clock repeats the larger, I,

Your too-faithful daughter, still drag behind

you,

Turning in the same slow circles.

Across the years and distances, my hands

Among these fierce, red blossoms repeat

Your gestures. I hope my daughter never

writes:

“Because you did, I too arrange flowers.”

Ritratto

He was a two-bit Petrarchist who lounged

Near the Uffizi in the ochre afternoons

Surveying the girls. A certain insolence

In how he moved his hips, his stony eyes,

His hands which seemed to cup their breasts

like fruit

As they slid by, pretending blank disdain,

Won him a modest reputation in a place

Where sad-eyed satyrs of an ageless middle

age

Are seldom scarce.

On rainy days he stalked

The galleries. Between the Giottos

And Masaccios, he slithered hissing

In his moccasins, and whistling low.

His metaphors were old; the girls were

young.

Their eyes (he said) were little lakes of blue

(Rolling the bella lingua off his tongue).

Their hair was gold, their lips like flowers

that grew

Within his bel’ giardino on the hill.

(Although he had no garden on the hill,

In summer the young girls grew thick as

weeds.)

Blonds were his passion but (like Tacitus)

he thought

The German fräuleins blowzy, rugged,

rough

And yet inevitable: August brought

Such hordes as might have sacked another

Rome.

He always sent the fair barbarians home

With something Burckhardt hardly hinted at.

(He kept his assignations in a Fiat.)

You should have seen his little pied-à-

terre—

Two blocks from where his mother lived;

there

He kept his treasures: blonds of every

nation—

(Two dozen half-undressed U.N.

legations)—

Were photographically ensconced along his

wall.

Beside the crucifix and Virgin was a small

Photo of la Mamma—which surveyed,

With madamely aplomb, the girls he’d laid.

(Note also: right below the feet of God,

A shelf with hair oil and Justine by Sade.)

The Perfect Poet

He says he is a perfect poet.

He lives alone, with his perfect mate.

& sometimes they don’t even speak,

So perfectly do they “communicate.”

He lives alone, his greatest pleasures are

His pipes, his books, his wife’s behind—

Which he will often pinch to hear her laugh;

He’s got a perfect love for womankind.

He seldom writes, distrusting language as

A clumsy tool, unequal to his thoughts:

He uses it as rarely as he can

(No doubt to punish it for all its faults).

But when he writes, he keeps the upper hand

(On principle, since words are enemies).

He melts them down, then counterfeits his

own—

A kind of literary alchemy.

He’s fortunate to have a perfect muse.

A live-in muse, who cooks inspiringly;

And sometimes after an ambrosial meal,

He’ll grab his pen, composing feverishly

A perfect poem, describing in detail

The salad, wine, the roast in buttery baste.

And reading it, his musing wife agrees

That every line smacks of his perfect taste.

Autumn Perspective

Now, moving in, cartons on the floor,

the radio playing to bare walls,

picture hooks left stranded

in the unsoiled squares where paintings

were,

and something reminding us

this is like all other moving days;

finding the dirty ends of someone else’s life,

hair fallen in the sink, a peach pit,

and burned-out matches in a corner;

things not preserved, yet never swept away

like fragments of disturbing dreams

we stumble on all day…

in ordering our lives, we will discard them,

scrub clean the floorboards of this our home

lest refuse from the lives we did not lead

become, in some strange, frightening way,

our own.

And we have plans that will not tolerate

our fears—a year laid out like rooms

in a new house—the dusty wine glasses

rinsed off, the vases filled, and bookshelves

sagging with the heavy winter books.

Seeing the room always as it will be,

we are content to dust and wait.

We will return here from the dark and silent

streets, arms full of books and food,

anxious as we always are in winter,

and looking for the Good Life we have

made.

I see myself then: tense, solemn,

in high-heeled shoes that pinch,

not basking in the light of goals fulfilled,

but looking back to now and seeing

a lazy, sunburned, sandaled girl

in a bare room, full of promise

and feeling envious.

Now we plan, postponing, pushing our lives

forward

into the future—as if, when the room

contains us and all our treasured junk

we will have filled whatever gap it is

that makes us wander, discontented

from ourselves.

The room will not change:

a rug, or armchair, or new coat of paint

won’t make much difference;

our eyes are fickle

but we remain the same beneath our suntans,

pale, frightened,

dreaming ourselves backward and forward

in time,

dreaming our dreaming selves.

I look forward and see myself look back.

The Nazi Amphitheatre

Abandoned by their parents

in a wood,

Hansel & Gretel

found this place:

a child’s nightmare

run wild with weeds;

blank stage for the hero,

seats stepping off:

optical illusions;

poles for flags flapping:

cheering tongues;

pines bayonetting the sky;

a forest formed

of all the fears

in night’s imagination.

Now we come upon it hand in hand,

see nothing but an earthen bowl

littered with bottle bits

& condom wrappers,

disowned by the town,

harangued by rain,

the focus of conflicting

memories. (“Hitler spoke here.”

“No, he never did.”)

—As if it mattered.

This place is a house

bought by a manic

& not remembered

later in the asylum.

Invisible from the city,

forgotten in a gothic forest,

it waits for Hansel & Gretel

(us perhaps) to wake up,

dreaming some recurrent dream.

By Train from Berlin

A delicate border. A nonexistent country.

The train obligingly dissolves in smoke.

The G.I. next to me is talking war.

I don’t “know the Asian mind,” he says.

Moving through old arguments.

At Potsdam (a globe-shaped dome,

a pink canal reflecting sepia trees)

we pull next to a broken-down old train

with REICHSBAHN lettered on its flank.

Thirty years sheer away leaving bare cliff.

This is a country I don’t recognize.

Bone-pale girls who have nothing to do with

home.

Everyone’s taller than me, everyone naked.

“Life’s cheap there,” he says.

But why are we screaming over a track

which runs between a barbed wire corridor?

And why has it grown so dark outside,

so bright in here

that even the pared moon is invisible?

In the window we can only see ourselves,

America we carry with us,

two scared people talking death

on a train which can’t stop.

Near the Black Forest

Living in a house

near the Black Forest,

without any clocks,

she’s begun

to listen to the walls.

Her neighbors have clocks,

not one

but twenty clocks apiece.

Sometimes

a claque of clocks

applauds

the passing of each day.

Listen to the walls

& wind your watch.

Poor love, poor love,

have they caught you

by the pendulum?

Do they think they’ve

got you stopped?

Have you

already gathered how,

living near the Black Forest,

she gets by

on cups of borrowed time?

The Artist as an Old Man

If you ask him he will talk for hours—

how at fourteen he hammered signs, fingers

raw with cold, and later painted bowers

in ladies’ boudoirs; how he played checkers

for two weeks in jail, and lived on dark bread;

how he fled the border to a country

which disappeared wars ago; unfriended

crossed a continent while this century

began. He seldom speaks of painting now.

Young men have time and theories; old men work.

He has painted countless portraits. Sallow

nameless faces, made glistening in oil, smirk

above anonymous mantelpieces.

The turpentine has a familiar smell,

but his hand trembles with odd, new palsies.

Perched on the maulstick, it nears the easel.

He has come to like his resignation.

In his sketch books, ink-dark cossacks hear

the snorts of horses in the crunch of snow.

His pen alone recalls that years ago,

one horseman set his teeth and aimed his spear

which, poised, seemed pointed straight to pierce the sun.

The Catch

You take me to the restaurant where one

plays god over a fish tank. The fat trout

pace their green cage, waiting to be taken

out of an element. Who knows what they know?

There are thirteen in a tank meant

for goldfish. I don’t care which one I eat.

But the waiter expects a performance,

con brio. This is a ritual

solemn as wine-tasting or the Last Judgment.

Eating is never so simple as hunger.

Between the appetite and its satisfaction

falls the net, groping blindly in dark water.

The fish startle and thrash. You make your catch,

flourishing a bit for the waiter

so as not to be thought a peasant. You force

air into the trout’s gills as if he were Adam,

and send him squirming toward the kitchen

to be born. Then it’s my turn. I surprise

myself with my dexterity, almost

enjoying the game. A liter of wine

later, the fish return, foppishly dressed

in mushrooms and pimentos, their eyes

dreamily hazed. Darling, I am drunk. I watch you pluck

the trout’s ribs out of your perfect teeth.

At the Museum of Natural History

The lessons we learned here

(fumbling with our lunchbags,

handkerchiefs

& secret cheeks of bubblegum)

were graver than any

in the schoolroom:

the dangers of a life

frozen into poses.

Trilobites in their

petrified ghettos,

lumbering dinosaurs

who’d outsized themselves

told how nature was

an endless morality play

in which the cockroach

(& all such beadyeyed

exemplars of adjustment)

might well recite the epilogue.

No one was safe

but stagnation was

the surest suicide.

To mankind’s Hamlet,

what six-legged creature would play

Fortinbras? It made you scratch

your head & think

for about two minutes.

Going out, I remember

how we stopped to look at

Teddy Roosevelt,

(Soldier, Statesman, Naturalist,

Hunter, Historian,

et cetera, et cetera).

His bronze bulk (four times life size)

bestrode Central Park West

like a colossus.

His monumental horse

snorted towards the park.

Oh, we were full of Evolution & its lessons

when (the girls giggling madly,

the boys blushing) we peeked

between those huge legs to see

those awe-inspiring

Brobdingnagian balls.

To James Boswell in London

Boswell—you old rake—I have tried to imitate

your style; but it is no use; my dialogues are

all between my selves: and though I sit up late,

make endless notes and jottings that I hope will jar

my memory—it is in vain—for in the end

I have no Dr. Johnson but myself.

The difference is (I think) between our lives. You spend

the morning at the coffee house, nourish yourself

with talk and kippers before proceeding on to dine.

A ramble across London perks the appetite.

Every step is an adventure; the written line

distills itself from life. How can you help but write?

I consort with books while you see men, haunt the shelves

where your London lies buried. Your book once opened,

I become the ghost, a pale phantom who delves

into your life to borrow moments penned

two hundred years ago. I roam your world ignored—

while my own life, waiting outside, questions my motives.

A man should never live more than he can record

you say; but what if he records more than he lives?

My journal swarms with me and even I am bored.

I am all my personae—children, lovers, wives,

philosophers and country-wenches. Though I give them

different robes and wigs to wear, all converse alike;

all reason falsely with the same stratagem;

each suspects the logic of the other, dislikes

him, yet cannot prove him wrong. Petty cavils

grow to monstrous issues, belabored arguments

resolve themselves only in sleep; darkness prevails.

Only the living find solace in common sense.

Safe, preserved from the rape of the world, I grow

dishonest, and pen my crooked words, for one can lie

with ease about those things the world will never know.

Conversation—that clearinghouse for thoughts—denied,

the mind gets gouty and the conscience needs a cane.

Notions unuttered seem to echo through the brain—

and our monologues are doomed to the same end.

We all think better—interrupted by a friend.

Death of a Romantic

He died in Rome, in all that sunlight,

the Spanish Steps full of trysting lovers,

Bernini’s watery boat still sinking

in the fountain in the square below.

And even if they weren’t lovers

who crowded the burning steps that day—

but businessmen complaining of the heat,

tired tourists or prowling gigolos—

he had to bear his dark delirium

while the world breathed and sweated outside.

It was no day to die—his tongue dumb

with fever, and all his senses raging

out of tune—The slow continuo

of fountains, weakly pulsing,

a disembodied rhythm robbed of song—

and all that unexpected, wide-flung sky

shattered hourly by bells, the frenzied

flapping of a lone bird’s wings

—determined—in a wilderness of air.

The sunlight fades now, eyes bound burning

within their fleshy lids—they close to see

kaleidoscopes of light, the spectrum suns,

—those fiery self-consuming hearts that blaze

one final time, against finality

like embers flaring in a gust of breath

—when death—the silent, steadfast muse,

the faithful lover—comes to consummate

a long flirtation.

Eveningsong at Bellosguardo

Chi vuol esser lieto, sia:

di doman non c’e certezza.

—Lorenzo di Medici

In the poplars’ lengthening shadows on this hill,

amid the rows of marigolds and earth,

and through the boxhedge labyrinth we walk,

together, to the choiring twilight bells.

Their fugue of echoes echoes through the hills

and sings against this time-streaked, flowering wall

where breezes coax the potted lemon trees,

the pendant, yellow fruit and shiny leaves.

Beneath the flaming watercolor sky,

the cultivated, terraced drop of hill,

a gleaming city with its towers and domes,

the Arno shimmering as it drowns the sun.

Chameleon-like, I am transformed by light,

and wine has blurred the edges of the night.

What gifts I give on this or any night

may be refracted in another light.

You understand this in a foreign tongue,

but vaguely, for these things will not translate.

I feel it in the cadence of your walk:

you are not one whom moonlight can create.

And you will think the loosening of these thighs,

the sudden, urging whiteness of the throat

are muted but distinctly pagan cries

and in your triumph you will fairly gloat.

Tonight the unplucked lemons almost gleam.

And with their legs, the crickets harmonize.

The trees are rustling an uncertain hymn,

and unseen birds contribute trembling cries.

When did the summer censor choiring things?

We know the blood is brutal though it sings.

On Sending You a Lock of My Hair

There is a white wood house near Hampstead Heath

in whose garden the nightingale still sings.

Though Keats is dead, the bird who sang of death

returns with melodies, on easeful wings.

A lock of hair the poet’s love received

remains in the room where first it was shorn;

An heirloom, its history half-believed,

its strands now faded and its ribbon worn.

On polished floors, through squares of summer sun

I felt his footsteps move, as if the elf

—deceiving elf, he called her—had not done

with making mischief to amuse herself.

I saw him clip that tousled lock of hair,

and though he did not offer it to me,

I felt that I was privileged, standing there,

and took his gesture for my legacy.

In Defense of the English Portrait School

Apologists blame it on the English

temperament, which “unable to conceive

the monumental,” called for stylish

portraits of the rich. The critics forgive

Gainsborough, considering the bad taste

of his patrons: if you squint and pretend

that the satin isn’t satin, a feast

of color awaits you, they recommend.

The stoop-shouldered young men with knotted brows

walk through the English gallery sullenly,

still denying the sun-dappled meadows

of a vanished upper class. A lady

Lawrence painted dangles gloves of amber

suede between fingers slim from idleness;

Her satin cape blowing in October

wind is heavy, silvery white and soundless,

addressing itself to clouds of similar

stuff. She looks away unmindful that she

is not profound, or even popular.

Across from her a rake whose pedigree

is told in the knowing curl of his lip,

slaps the sleek rump of his burnished brown mare.

He holds a leather crop and at his hip

his watch fob glints; he waits and on a dare

he’d take the pasture at a gallop, jump

the highest fences, hooves making hollows

in the echoing air. Three children, plump

with laughter, are busy feeding sparrows

on another canvas. They toss their heads

to shake their curls with sunlight, stretch their arms

to show their puckered hands. The boy who spreads

the bread crumbs on the ground, quietly disarms

us, though we know he probably grew old,

deserved his gout, had a borough in each

pocket, and unknowing died a cuckold.

It is his splendid childhood we reproach

by thinking of the vices he was heir to;

envy calling history as witness

to taint the boyish smile the artist drew.

Oh leave the poor aristocrats in peace!

No one is fooled, for Hogarth painted too;

and though not democratic, art can please—

the cavil is absurd, the colors true.

To X. (With Ephemeral Kisses)

I hear you will not fall in love with me

because I come without a guarantee,

because someday I may depart at whim

and leave you desolate, abandoned, grim.

If that’s the case, what use to be alive?

In loving life you love what can’t survive:

and if you grow too fond and lose your head,

it’s all for nought—for someday you’ll be dead.

Maintain a cool detachment through the years.

Wear blinders, dear, put cotton in your ears.

Since worms will taste the tongue that tastes the wine,

burst not the grape against your palate fine.

With care, your puny heart will still be whole

the day they come to fetch your tepid soul.

And as that strumpet, Life, deals her last blow,

you’ll have this final consolatio:

you’ll snap your flippant fingers as you fall,

and say, “I never cared for her at all!”

The Lives of the Poets: Three Profiles

I.

He was content to speak of little things—

the sound of raindrops on a roof, the scent

of spring, a field of haystacks, a hill

of cherry trees, a pebble’s smoothness

or a thrush’s wings; nor ever seemed to care

that nations fought, that men and women loved,

that young men died, that scholars quarreled,

that politicians lied, that children hungered

while their mothers cried. But what he spoke of

(it cannot be denied) he spoke of sweetly

and he never falsified. With all good cheer

he took his limitation, and never risked

his pen on any side. His silence was

the bulk of his creation: he held his tongue

too much, perhaps, but then, he never lied.

II.

By birth, upbringing, inclination,

he made his task the mastery of words,

became the spokesman for his generation,

and reaped from that the double-edged rewards.

Through two world wars he railed against the lie

that bloodshed ever serves a noble cause,

saw anarchy invade, and made reply,

by praising order, harmony and law.

Likewise when famine struck, when children died,

when innocents were sentenced without trial,

he always let his conscience be his guide—

though critics claimed it much impaired his style.

Throughout a long career of writing verse,

he often changed his mind; men have the right:

exchanged his benedictions for a curse,

transformed his politics from left to right.

Although his prophet’s cape did not quite fit,

although he made mistakes because he dared,

he chronicled his age with biting wit,

and though he did not change the world, he cared.

III.

He had no complex notion of aesthetics.

He liked his food well-spiced, his women fair;

he had a kind of passion for athletics,

and at the age of sixty, all his hair.

He worshipped music and he liked to drink,

was fond of travel, company, long walks;

he could not bear to be alone to think,

and best of all, he dearly loved to talk.

It’s doubtful how he chose his occupation;

he thought that routine work was Adam’s curse.

He had some money, and a talent for narration

and one day tried his hand at writing verse.

His ear for words was almost never wrong;

he liked applause and reveled in his fame.

Whatever crossed his mind became a song,

and yet he half-conceived his craft a game.

In all his poems there seemed to be the hint

that had his stay on earth been better timed,

he would have rushed to battle, not to print,

but since there was no Troy to fight, he rhymed.

III

FROM

Fruits & Vegetables

(1971)

Fruits & Vegetables

1

Goodbye, he waved, entering the apple.

That red siren,

whose white flesh turns brown

with prolonged exposure to air,

opened her perfect cheeks to receive him.

She took him in.

The garden revolved

in her glossy patinas of skin.

Goodbye.

2

O note the two round holes in onion.

3

Did I tell you about

my mother’s avocado?

She grew it from a pit.

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 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

Walking Through the Upper East Side

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.

Here Comes

(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.

The Commandments

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.

Aging

(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

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

In Sylvia Plath Country

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?

A Reading

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.

Imaginary Landscapes

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.

The Saturday Market

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.

The Heidelberg Landlady

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.

Student Revolution

(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.

Flying You Home

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.

Books

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

Books with rice-paper pastings

Books with book fungus blooming over their pages

Books with pages of skin with flesh-colored bindings

Books by men in love with the letter O

Books which smell of earth whose pages turn

IV

FROM

Half-Lives

(1973)

The Evidence

1

Evidence of life:

snapshots,

hundreds of split-seconds

when the eyes glazed over,

the hair stopped its growing,

the nails froze in fingertips,

the blood hung suspended

in its vessels—

while the small bloodships,

the red & white bloodboats

buoyed up & down at anchor

like the toys

of millionaires….

Evidence of life:

a split-second’s death

to live forever

in something called

a print.

A paparazzo life:

I shoot therefore I am.

2

Why does life need evidence

of life?

We disbelieve it

even as we live.

The bloodboats gently rocking,

the skull opening every night

to dreams more vivid than itself,

more solid

than its own bones,

the brain flowering with petals,

stamens, pistils,

magical fruit

which reproduces

from its own juice,

which invents

its own mouth,

& makes itself anew

each night.

3

Evidence of life?

My dreams.

The dreams which I write down.

The dreams which I relate

each morning with a solemn face

inventing as I go.

Evidence of life:

that we could meet for the first time,

open our scars & stitches to each other,

weave our legs around

each other’s patchwork dreams

& try to salve each other’s wounds

with love—

if it was love.

(I am not sure at all

if love is salve

or just

a deeper kind of wound.

I do not think it matters.)

If it was lust or hunger

& not love,

if it was all that they accused us of

(that we accused ourselves)—

I do not think it matters.

4

Evidence of love?

I imagine our two heads

sliced open like grapefruits,

pressed each half to half

& mingling acid juice

in search of sweet.

I imagine all my dreams

sliding out into your open skull—

as if I were the poet,

you the reader.

I imagine all your dreams

pressed against my belly

like your sperm

& singing into me.

I imagine my two hands

cupped around your life

& stroking it.

I imagine your two hands

making whirlpools

in my blood,

then quelling them.

5

I have no photograph of you.

At times I hardly can believe in you.

Except this ache,

this longing in my gut,

this emptiness which theorizes you

because if there is emptiness this deep,

there must be fullness somewhere.

My other half!

My life beyond this half-life!

Is life a wound

which dreams of being healed?

Is love a wound which deepens

as it dreams?

Do you exist?

Evidence:

these poems in which

I have been conjuring you,

this book which makes your absence palpable,

these longings printed black.

I am exposed.

I am a print of darkness

on a square of film.

I am a garbled dream

told by a breakfast-table liar.

I am a wound which has forgotten how to heal.

6

& if it wasn’t love,

if you called me now

across the old echo chamber of the ocean

& said:

“Look, I never loved you,”

I would feel

a little like a fool perhaps,

& yet it wouldn’t matter.

My business is to always feel

a little like a fool

& speak of it.

& I am sure

that when we love

we are better than ourselves

& when we hate,

worse.

& even if we call it madness later

& scrawl four-letter words

across those outhouse walls

we call our skulls—

we stand revealed

by those sudden moments

when we come together.

7

Evidence?

Or was it just my dream

waltzing with your dream?

My nightmare kissing yours?

When I awakened

did I walk with Jacob’s limp?

Did I sing a different song?

Did I find the inside of my palm

scarred as if

(for moments) it held fire?

Did my blood flow as riverwater flows

around a tree stump—

crooked, with a lilt?

What other evidence

did I need?

Seventeen Warnings in Search of a Feminist Poem

For Aaron Asher

1        Beware of the man who denounces ambition;

his fingers itch under his gloves.

2        Beware of the man who denounces war

through clenched teeth.

3        Beware of the man who denounces women writers;

his penis is tiny & cannot spell.

4        Beware of the man who wants to protect you;

he will protect you from everything but himself.

5        Beware of the man who loves to cook;

he will fill your kitchen with greasy pots.

6        Beware of the man who loves your soul;

he is a bullshitter.

7        Beware of the man who denounces his mother;

he is a son of a bitch.

8        Beware of the man who spells son of a bitch as one word;

he is a hack.

9        Beware of the man who loves death too well;

he is taking out insurance.

10      Beware of the man who loves life too well;

he is a fool.

11      Beware of the man who denounces psychiatrists;

he is afraid.

12      Beware of the man who trusts psychiatrists;

he is in hock.

13      Beware of the man who picks your dresses;

he wants to wear them.

14      Beware of the man you think is harmless;

he will surprise you.

15      Beware of the man who cares for nothing but books;

he will run like a trickle of ink.

16      Beware of the man who writes flowery love letters;

he is preparing for years of silence.

17      Beware of the man who praises liberated women;

he is planning to quit his job.

Divorce

Eggs boiling in a pot.

They click

like castanets.

I put one in a cup

& slice its head off.

Under the wobbly egg white

is my first husband.

Look how small he’s grown

since last we met!

“Eat me,” he says agreeably.

I hesitate, then bite.

The thick yolk runs down

my thighs.

I take another egg

& slice its head.

Inside is my second husband.

This one’s better done.

“You liked the white,” I say,

“I liked the yolk.”

He doesn’t speak

but scowls as if to say:

“Everyone always eats me

in the end.”

I chew him up

but I spit out

his jet-black hair,

the porcelain jackets from his teeth,

his cufflinks, fillings,

eyeglass frames….

I drink my coffee

& I read the Times.

Another egg is boiling in the pot.

Paper Cuts

Endless duplication of lives and objects…

—Theodore Roethke

I have known the imperial power of secretaries,

the awesome indifference of receptionists,

I have been intimidated by desk & typewriter,

by the silver jaws of the stapler

& the lecherous kiss of the mucilage,

& the unctuousness of rubber cement

before it dries.

I have been afraid of telephones,

have put my mouth to their stale tobacco breath,

have been jarred to terror

by their jangling midnight music,

& their sudden blackness

even when they are white.

I have been afraid in elevators

amid the satin hiss of cables

& the silky lisping of air conditioners

& the helicopter blades of fans.

I have seen time killed in the office jungles

of undeclared war.

My fear has crept into the paper guillotine

& voyaged to the Arctic Circle of the water cooler.

My fear has followed me into the locked Ladies Room,

& down the iron fire stairs

to the postage meter.

I have seen the mailroom women like lost letters

frayed around the edges.

I have seen the Xerox room men

shuffling in & out among each other

like cards in identical decks.

I have come to tell you I have survived.

I bring you chains of paperclips instead of emeralds.

I bring you lottery tickets instead of poems.

I bring you mucilage instead of love.

I lay my body out before you on the desk.

I spread my hair amid a maze of rubber stamps.

RUSH. SPECIAL DELIVERY. DO NOT BEND.

I am open—will you lick me like an envelope?

I am bleeding—will you kiss my paper cuts?

Alcestis on the Poetry Circuit

(In Memoriam Marina Tsvetayeva, Anna Wickham, Sylvia Plath, Shakespeare’s sister, etc., etc.)

The best slave

does not need to be beaten.

She beats herself.

Not with a leather whip,

or with stick or twigs,

not with a blackjack

or a billyclub,

but with the fine whip

of her own tongue

& the subtle beating

of her mind

against her mind.

For who can hate her half so well

as she hates herself?

& who can match the finesse

of her self-abuse?

Years of training

are required for this.

Twenty years

of subtle self-indulgence,

self-denial;

until the subject

thinks herself a queen

& yet a beggar—

both at the same time.

She must doubt herself

in everything but love.

She must choose passionately

& badly.

She must feel lost as a dog

without her master.

She must refer all moral questions

to her mirror.

She must fall in love with a Cossack

or a poet.

She must never go out of the house

unless veiled in paint.

She must wear tight shoes

so she always remembers her bondage.

She must never forget

she is rooted in the ground.

Though she is quick to learn

& admittedly clever,

her natural doubt of herself

should make her so weak

that she dabbles brilliantly

in half a dozen talents

& thus embellishes

but does not change

our life.

If she’s an artist

& comes close to genius,

the very fact of her gift

should cause her such pain

that she will take her own life

rather than best us.

& after she dies, we will cry

& make her a saint.

Mother

Ash falls on the roof

of my house.

I have cursed you enough

in the lines of my poems

& between them,

in the silences which fall

like ash-flakes

on the watertank

from a smog-bound sky.

I have cursed you

because I remember

the smell of Joy

on a sealskin coat

& because I feel

more abandoned than a baby seal

on an ice floe red

with its mother’s blood.

I have cursed you

as I walked & prayed

on a concrete terrace

high above the street

because whatever I pulled down

with my bruised hand

from the bruising sky,

whatever lovely plum

came to my mouth

you envied

& spat out.

Because you saw me in your image,

because you favored me,

you punished me.

It was only a form of you

my poems were seeking.

Neither of us knew.

For years

we lived together in a single skin.

We shared fur coats.

We hated each other

as the soul hates the body

for being weak,

as the mind hates the stomach

for needing food,

as one lover hates the other.

I kicked

in the pouch of your theories

like a baby kangaroo.

I believed you

on Marx, on Darwin,

on Tolstoy & Shaw.

I said I loved Pushkin

(you loved him).

I vowed Monet

was better than Bosch.

Who cared?

I would have said nonsense

to please you

& frequently did.

This took the form,

of course,

of fighting you.

We fought so gorgeously!

We fought like one boxer

& his punching bag.

We fought like mismatched twins.

We fought like the secret sharer

& his shade.

Now we’re apart.

Time doesn’t heal

the baby to the womb.

Separateness is real

& keeps on growing.

One by one the mothers

drop away,

the lovers leave,

the babies outgrow clothes.

Some get insomnia—

the poet’s disease—

& sit up nights

nursing

at the nipples

of their pens.

I have made hot milk

& kissed you where you are.

I have cursed my curses.

I have cleared the air.

& now I sit here writing,

breathing you.

The Eggplant Epithalamion

For Grace St David Griffin

& for Iris Love

“Mostly you eat eggplant at least once a day,” she explained. “A Turk won’t marry a woman unless she can cook eggplant at least a hundred ways.”

Archaeologist Iris Love, speaking of the cuisine on digs in Turkey. The New York Times, February 4, 1971

1

There are more than a hundred Turkish poems

about eggplant.

I would like to give you all of them.

If you scoop out every seed,

you can read me backward

like an Arabic book.

Look.

2

(Lament in Aubergine)

Oh aubergine,

egg-shaped

& as shiny as if freshly laid—

you are a melancholy fruit.

Solarium Melongena.

Every animal is sad

after eggplant.

3

(Byzantine Eggplant Fable)

Once upon a time on the coast of Turkey

there lived a woman who could cook eggplant 99 ways.

She could slice eggplant thin as paper.

She could write poems on it & batter-fry it.

She could bake eggplant & broil it.

She could even roll the seeds in banana-

flavored cigarette papers

& get her husband high on eggplant.

But he was not pleased.

He went to her father & demanded his bride-price back.

He said he’d been cheated.

He wanted back two goats, twelve chickens

& a camel as reparation.

His wife wept & wept.

Her father raved.

The next day she gave birth to an eggplant.

It was premature & green

& she had to sit on it for days

before it hatched.

“This is my hundredth eggplant recipe,” she screamed.

“I hope you’re satisfied!”

(Thank Allah that the eggplant was a boy.)

4

(Love & the Eggplant)

On the warm coast of Turkey, Miss Love

eats eggplant

“at least once a day.”

How fitting that love should eat eggplant,

that most aphrodisiac fruit.

Fruit of the womb

of Asia Minor,

reminiscent of eggs,

of Istanbul’s deep purple nights

& the Byzantine eyes of Christ.

I remember the borders of egg & dart

fencing us off from the flowers & fruit

of antiquity.

I remember the egg & tongue

probing the lost scrolls of love.

I remember the ancient faces

of Aphrodite

hidden by dust

in the labyrinth under

the British Museum

to be finally found by Miss Love

right there

near Great Russell Square.

I think of the hundreds of poems of the eggplant

& my friends who have fallen in love

over an eggplant,

who have opened the eggplant together

& swum in its seeds,

who have clung in the egg of the eggplant

& have rocked to sleep

in love’s dark purple boat.

Touch

The house of the body

is a stately manor

open for nothing

never to the public.

But

for the owner of the house,

the key-holder—

the body swings open

like Ali Baba’s mountain

glistening with soft gold

& red jewels.

These cannot be stolen

or sold for money.

They only glisten

when the mountain opens

by magic

or its own accord.

The gold triangle of hair,

its gentle ping,

the pink quartz crystals

of the skin,

the ruby nipples,

the lapis

of the veins

that swim the breast…

The key-holder

is recognized

by the way he holds

the body.

He is recognized

by touch.

Touch is the first sense to awaken

after the body’s little death

in sleep.

Touch is the first sense

to alert the raw red infant

to a world of pain.

The body glimmers

on its dark mountain

pretending ignorance of this.

Gardener

I am in love with my womb

& jealous of it.

I cover it tenderly

with a little pink hat

(a sort of yarmulke)

to protect it from men.

Then I listen for the gentle, ping

of the ovary:

a sort of cupid’s bow

released.

I’m proud of that.

& the spot of blood

in the little hat

& the egg so small

I cannot see it

though I pray to it.

I imagine the inside

of my womb to be

the color of poppies

& bougainvillea

(though I’ve never seen it).

But I fear the barnacle

which might latch on

& not let go

& fear the monster

who might grow

to bite the flowers

& make them swell & bleed.

So I keep my womb empty

& full of possibility.

Each month

the blood sheets down

like good red rain.

I am the gardener.

Nothing grows without me.

The Prisoner

The cage of myself clamps shut.

My words turn the lock.

I am the jailor rattling the keys.

I am the torturer’s assistant

who nods & smiles

& pretends not

to be responsible.

I am the clerk who stamps

the death note

affixing the seal, the seal, the seal.

I am the lackey who “follows orders.”

I have not got the authority.

I am the visitor

who brings a cake, baked

with a file.

Pale snail,

I wave between the bars.

I speak of rope with the hangman.

I chatter of sparks & currents

with the electrician.

Direct or alternating,

he is beautiful.

I flatter him.

I say he turns me on.

I tell the cyanide capsules

they have talent

& may fulfill themselves someday.

I read the warden’s awful novel

& recommend a publisher.

I sleep with the dietitian

who is hungry.

I sleep with the hangman

& reassure him

that he is a good lover.

I am the ideal prisoner.

I win prizes on my conduct.

They reduce my sentence.

Now it is only 99 years

with death like a dollop

of whipped cream at the end.

I am so grateful.

No one remembers

that I constructed this jail

& peopled its cells.

No one remembers my blueprints

& my plans,

my steady hammering,

my dreams of fantastic escapes.

& even I,

patiently writing away,

my skin yellowing

like the pages of old paperbacks,

my hair turning gray,

cannot remember the first crime,

the crime

I was born for.

The Other Side of the Page

I pass to the other side of the page.

—Pablo Neruda

On the other side of the page

where the lost days go,

where the lost poems go,

where the forgotten dreams

breaking up like morning fog

go

go

go

I am preparing myself for death.

I am teaching myself emptiness:

the gambler’s hunger for love,

the nun’s hunger for God,

the child’s hunger for chocolate

in the brown hours

of the dark.

I am teaching myself love:

the lean love of marble

kissed away by rain,

the cold kisses of snow crystals

on granite grave markers,

the soul kisses of snow

as it melts in the spring.

On the other side of the page

I lie making a snow angel

with the arcs

of my arms.

I lie like a fallen skier

who never wants to get up.

I lie with my poles, my pens

flung around me in the snow

too far to reach.

The snow seeps

into the hollows of my bones

& the calcium white of the page

silts me in like a fossil.

I am fixed in my longing for speech,

I am buried in the snowbank of my poems,

I am here where you find me

dead

on the her side of the page.

V

FROM

Loveroot

(1975)

To Pablo Neruda

Again & again

I have read your books

without ever wishing to know you.

I suck the alphabet of blood.

I chew the iron filings of your words.

I kiss your images like moist mouths

while the black seeds of your syllables

fly, fly, fly

into my lungs.

Untranslated, untranslatable,

you are rooted inside me—

not you—but the you

of your poems:

the man of his word,

the lover who digs into the alien soil

of one North American woman

& plants a baby—

love-child of Whitman

crossed with the Spanish language,

embryo, sapling, half-breed

of my tongue.

♦

I saw you once—

your flesh—

at Columbia.

My alma mater

& you the visiting soul.

Buddha-like

you sat before a Buddha;

& the audience

craned its neck

to take you in.

Freak show—

visiting poet.

You sat clothed

in your thick

imperious flesh.

I wanted to comfort you

& not to stare.

Our words knew each other.

That was enough.

♦

Now you are dead

of fascism & cancer—

your books scattered,

the oil cruet on the floor.

The sea surges through your house

at Isla Negra,

& the jackboots

walk on water.

♦

Poet of cats & grapefruits,

of elephant saints;

poet of broken dishes

& Machu Picchu;

poet of panthers

& pantheresses;

poet of lemons,

poet of lemony light.

The flies swarm

thicker than print on a page,

& poetry blackens

like overripe bananas.

The fascists you hated,

the communists you loved,

obscure the light, the lemons

with their buzzing.

We were together

on the side of light.

We walked together

though we never met.

The eyes are not political,

nor the tastebuds,

& the flesh tastes salty always

like the sea;

& the sea

turns back the flies.

Dear Colette

Dear Colette,

I want to write to you

about being a woman

for that is what you write to me.

I want to tell you how your face

enduring after thirty, forty, fifty…

hangs above my desk

like my own muse.

I want to tell you how your hands

reach out from your books

& seize my heart.

I want to tell you how your hair

electrifies my thoughts

like my own halo.

I want to tell you how your eyes

penetrate my fear

& make it melt.

I want to tell you

simply that I love you—

though you are “dead”

& I am still “alive.”

♦

Suicides & spinsters—

all our kind!

Even decorous Jane Austen

never marrying,

& Sappho leaping,

& Sylvia in the oven,

& Anna Wickham, Tsvetaeva, Sara Teasdale,

& pale Virginia floating like Ophelia,

& Emily alone, alone, alone….

But you endure & marry,

go on writing,

lose a husband, gain a husband,

go on writing,

sing & tap dance

& you go on writing,

have a child & still

you go on writing,

love a woman, love a man

& go on writing.

You endure your writing

& your life.

♦

Dear Colette,

I only want to thank you:

for your eyes ringed

with bluest paint like bruises,

for your hair gathering sparks

like brush fire,

for your hands which never willingly

let go,

for your years, your child, your lovers,

all your books…

Dear Colette,

you hold me

to this life.

Dear Marys, Dear Mother, Dear Daughter

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

author of

A Vindication

Of the Rights of Woman:

Born 27 April, 1759:

Died 10 September, 1797

—MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT’S

GRAVESTONE, PLACED BY

WILLIAM GODWIN, 1798

I was lonesome as a Crusoe.

—MARY SHELLEY

It is all over,

little one, the flipping

and overleaping, the watery

somersaulting alone in the oneness

under the hill, under

the old, lonely bellybutton…

—GALWAY KINNELL

What terrified me will terrify others…

—MARY SHELLEY

1 / Needlepoint

Mothers & daughters…

something sharp

catches in my throat

as I watch my mother

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!”

Elegy for a Whale

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.

For My Sister, Against Narrowness

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.

For My Husband

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.

Cheever’s People

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.

Dear Anne Sexton, I

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.

Dear Anne Sexton, II

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

the manner of your death

the way I might have once

revised your poem.

You are like nobody

since I love you,

& you are gone.

♦

Can you believe

your death gave birth to me?

Live or die,

you said insistently.

You chose the second

& the first chose me.

I mourned you

& I found him

in one week.

♦

Is love the sugar-coated poison

that gets us in the end?

We spoke of men

as often as of poems.

We tried to legislate away

the need for love—

that backseat fuck

& death caressing you.

♦

Why did you do it

in your mother’s coat?

(I know

but also know

I have to ask.)

Our mothers get us hooked,

then leave us cold,

all full-grown orphans

hungering after love.

♦

You loved a man who spoke

“like greeting cards.”

“He fucks me well

but I can’t talk to him.”

We shared that awful need

to talk in bed.

Love wasn’t love

if we could only speak

in tongues.

♦

& the intensity of unlove

increased

until the motor, the running motor

could no longer power

the driver,

& you, with miles to go,

would rather sleep.

♦

Between the pills, the suicide pills

& our giggly vodkas in the Algonquin…

Between your round granny glasses

& your eyes blue as glaciers…

Between your stark mother-hunger

& your mother courage,

you knew there was only one poem

we all were writing.

♦

No competition.

“The poem belongs to everyone

& God.”

I jumped out of your

suicide car

& into his arms.

Your death was mine.

I ate it

& returned.

♦

Now I sit by a lake

writing to you.

I love a man

who makes my fingers ache.

I type to you

off somewhere in the clouds.

I tap the table

like a spiritualist.

♦

Sex is a part of death;

that much I know.

Your voice was earth,

your eyes were glacier-blue.

Your slender torso

& long-stemmed American legs

drape across

this huge blue western sky.

♦

I want to tell you “Wait,

don’t do it yet.”

Love is the poison, Anne,

but love eats death.

Dearest Man-in-the-Moon,

ever since our lunch of cheese

& moonjuice

on the far side of the sun,

I have walked the craters of New York,

a trail of slime

ribboning between my legs,

a phosphorescent banner

which is tied to you,

a beam of moonlight

focused on your navel,

a silver chain

from which my body dangles,

& my whole torso chiming

like sleighbells in a Russian novel.

Dearest man-in-the moon,

I used to fear moonlight

thinking her my mother.

I used to dread nights

when the moon was full.

I used to scream

“Pull down the shade!”

because the moonface leered at me,

because I felt her mocking,

because my fear lived in me

like rats in a wheel of cheese.

You have eaten out my fear.

You have licked

the creamy inside of my moon.

You have kissed

the final crescent of my heart

& made it full.

Dear Keats

For Howard Moss

Already six years past your age!

The steps in Rome,

the house near Hampstead Heath,

& all your fears

that you might cease to be

before your pen had glean’d….

My dear dead friend,

you were the first to teach me

how the dust could sing.

I followed in your footsteps

up the Heath.

I listened hard

for Lethe’s nightingale.

& now at 31, I want to live.

Oblivion holds no adolescent charms.

& all the “souls of poets

dead & gone,”

& all the “Bards

of Passion & Mirth”

cannot make death—

its echo, its damp earth—

resemble birth.

♦

You died in Rome—

in faltering sunlight—

Bernini’s watery boat still sinking

in the fountain in the square below.

When Severn came to say

the roses bloomed,

you did not “glut thy sorrow,”

but you wept—

you wept for them

& for your posthumous life.

& yet we all lead posthumous lives somehow.

The broken lyre,

the broken lung,

the broken love.

Our names are writ in newsprint

if not water.

“Don’t breathe on me—” you cried,

“it comes like ice.”

♦

Last words.

(I can’t imagine mine.

Perhaps some muttered dream,

some poem, some curse.)

Three months past 25,

you lived on milk.

They reeled you backward

in the womb of love.

♦

A tepid February Roman Spring.

Fruit trees in bloom

& Hampstead still in snow

& Fanny Brawnereceives a hopeful note

when you are two weeks dead.

A poet’s life:

always awaiting mail.

♦

For God’s sake

kick against the pricks!

There aren’t very many roses.

Your life was like an hourglass

with no sand.

The words slid through

& rested under glass;

the flesh decayed

to moist Italian clay.

♦

At autopsy,

your lungs were wholly gone.

Was that from too much singing?

Too many rifts of ore?

You spent your life breath

breathing life in words.

But words return no breath

to those who write.

Letters, Life, & Literary Remains…

“I find that I cannot exist without poetry….”

“O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”

“What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth….”

“We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us….”

“Sancho will invent a Journey heavenwards as well as anybody….”

“Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul.”

“Why should we kick against the Pricks when we can walk on Roses?”

“Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses….”

“Until we are sick, we understand not….”

“Sorrow is Wisdom….”

“Wisdom is folly….”

♦

Too wise

& yet not wise enough

at 25.

Sick, you understood

& understanding

were too weak to write.

Proved on the pulse: poetry.

If sorrow is wisdom

& wisdom is folly

then too much sorrow

is folly.

I find that I cannot exist without sorrow

& I find that sorrow

cannot exist without poetry….

What the imagination seizes as beauty

must be poetry….

What the imagination seizes must be…

♦

You claimed no lust for fame

& yet you burned.

“The faint conceptions I have of poems to come brings

the blood frequently into my forehead.”

I burn like you

until it often seems

my blood will break

the boundaries of my brain

& issue forth in one tall fountain

from my skull.

♦

A spume of blood from the forehead: poetry.

A plume of blood from the heart: poetry.

Blood from the lungs: alizarin crimson words.

♦

“I will not spoil my love of gloom

by writing an Ode to Darkness….”

The blood turns dark;

it stiffens on the sheet.

At night the childhood walls

are streaked with blood—

until the darkness seems awash with red

& children sleep behind two blood-branched lids.

♦

“My imagination is a monastery

& I am its monk…”

At five & twenty,

very far from home,

death picked you up

& sorted to a pip.

& 15 decades later,

your words breathe:

syllables of blood.

A strange transfusion

for my feverish verse.

I suck your breath,

your rhythms & your blood,

& all my fiercest dreams are sighed away.

I send you love,

dear Keats,

I send you peace.

Since flesh can’t stay

we keep the breath aloft.

Since flesh can’t stay,

we pass the words along.

Becoming a Nun

For Jennifer Josephy

On cold days

it is easy to be reasonable,

to button the mouth against kisses,

dust the breasts

with talcum powder

& forget

the red pulp meat

of the heart.

On those days

it beats

like a digital clock—

not a beat at all

but a steady whirring

chilly as green neon,

luminous as numerals in the dark,

cool as electricity.

& I think:

I can live without it all—

love with its blood pump,

sex with its messy hungers,

men with their peacock strutting,

their silly sexual baggage,

their wet tongues in my ear

& their words like little sugar suckers

with sour centers.

On such days

I am zipped in my body suit,

I am wearing seven league red suede boots,

I am marching over the cobblestones

as if they were the heads of men,

& I am happy

as a seven-year-old virgin

holding Daddy’s hand.

Don’t touch.

Don’t try to tempt me with your ripe persimmons.

Don’t threaten me with your volcano.

The sky is clearer when I’m not in heat,

& the poems

are colder.

Empty

…who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?

—Virginia Woolf

Every month,

the reminder of emptiness

so that you are tuned

to your bodyharp,

strung out on the harpsichord

of all your nerves

& hammered bloody blue

as the crushed fingers

of the woman pianist

beaten by her jealous lover.

Who was she?

Someone I invented

for this poem,

someone I imagined…

Never mind,

she is me, you—

tied to that bodybeat,

fainting on the rack of blood,

moving to the metronome—

empty, empty, empty.

No use.

The blood is thicker

than the roots of trees,

more persistent than my poetry,

more baroque than her bruised music.

It gilds the sky above the Virgin’s head.

It turns the lilies white.

Try to run:

the blood still follows you.

Swear off children,

seek a quiet room

to practice your preludes & fugues.

Under the piano,

the blood accumulates;

eventually it floats you both away.

Give in.

Babies cry & music is your life.

Darling, you were born to bleed

or rock.

& the heart breaks

either way.

Egyptology

I am the sphinx.

I am the woman buried in sand

up to her chin.

I am waiting for an archaeologist

to unearth me,

to dig out my neck & my nipples,

bare my claws

& solve my riddle.

No one has solved my riddle

since Oedipus.

♦

I face the pyramids which rise

like angular breasts

from the dry body of Egypt.

My fertile river is flowing down below—

a lovely lower kingdom.

Every woman should have a delta

with such rich silt—

brown as the buttocks

of Nubian queens.

♦

O friend, why have you come to Egypt?

Aton & Yahweh

are still feuding.

Moses is leading his people

& speaking of guilt.

The voice out of the volcano

will not be still.

♦

A religion of death,

a woman buried alive.

For thousands of years

the sand drifted over my head.

My sex was a desert,

my hair more porous than pumice,

& nobody sucked my lips

to make me tell.

♦

The pyramid breasts, though huge,

will never sag.

In the center of each one,

a king lies buried.

In the center of each one,

a darkened chamber…

a tunnel,

dead men’s bones,

malignant gold.

Parable of the Four-Poster

Because she wants to touch him,

she moves away.

Because she wants to talk to him,

she keeps silent.

Because she wants to kiss him,

she turns away

& kisses a man she does not want to kiss.

He watches

thinking she does not want him.

He listens

hearing her silence.

He turns away

thinking her distant

& kisses a girl he does not want to kiss.

They marry each other—

a four-way mistake.

He goes to bed with his wife

thinking of her.

She goes to bed with her husband

thinking of him.

— & all this in a real old-fashioned four-poster bed.

Do they live unhappily ever after?

Of course.

Do they undo their mistakes ever?

Never.

Who is the victim here?

Love is the victim.

Who is the villain?

Love that never dies.

Tapestry, with Unicorn

What we were searching for

did not, of course, exist—

that tapestried morning,

under those woven clouds

where impossible birds

sang quite incredibly

of unattainable things.

A moth among the dandelions

warbled like the nightingale of Keats,

& trochees sang among the iambs,

while you in your curled collar & brocaded vest,

were beaming down the sun-strewn silken grass

where I lay in a frenzy of ruffles,

ear pressed to the earth

so I might hear—

the echoing hoofbeats of the unicorn.

He came in a blaze

of embroidered glory, with agate eyes

and his infamous ivory horn

blaring baroque concerti—

& thinking to have captured him for good,

we toasted in white wine and wafers,

and took before witnesses,

impossible vows.

The rest you know:

how in the toadstool damp of evening

where lovers toss and cough,

speaking to each other

in the thick syllables of sleep,

through the long winter’s night of marriage,

the unicorn slips away,

& love, like an insomniac’s nightmare,

becomes only

the lesser of two evils.

Sometimes he comes again,

thrashing through the tapestried dark,

uprooting limbs & sheets

& finespun wisps of hair.

But the quest having been forgotten,

we do not know him,

or else we call him

by a different name.

The Poet Writes in I

The poet writes in I

because she knows

no other language.

We is a continent,

& a poet must be

an island.

She is an inlet.

He is a peninsula.

They is the great engulfing sea.

The poet writes in I

as the clock

strikes on metal,

as the bee wing

flies on honey,

as trees are rooted

in the sky.

I is the language

of the poet’s inner chantings:

a geography of sadness,

a metronome of pain,

a map of elevations

in the jungled heart.

Sunjuice

What happens when the juice of the sun

drenches you

with its lemony tang, its tart sweetness

& your whole body stings with singing

so that your toes sing to your mouth

& your navel whistles to your breasts

& your breasts wave to everyone

as you walk down the summer street?

What will you do

when nothing will do

but to throw your arms around trees

& men

& greet every woman as sister

& to run naked in the spray of the fire hydrants

with children of assorted colors?

Will you cover your drenched skin

with woolen clothes?

Will you wear a diaper of herringbone tweed?

Will you piece together a shroud of figleaves

& lecture at the University

on the Lives of the Major Poets,

the History of Despair in Art?

Insomnia & Poetry

Sweet muse

with bitter milk,

I have lain

between your breasts,

put my ear

to your sea-shell-whispering navel,

& strained the salty marshes

of your sex

between my milk teeth.

Then I’ve slept at last,

my teeming head

against your rocking thigh.

Gentle angry mother

poetry,

where could I turn

from the terror of the night

but to your sweet maddening

ambivalence?

Where could I rest

but in your hurricane?

Who would always take me home

but you,

sweeping off the sooty stoop

of your wind-filled shack

on the edge

of the volcano?

VI

FROM

How to Save Your Own Life

(1977)

The Puzzle

They locked into each other

like brother & sister,

long-lost relations,

orphans divided by time.

He bit her shoulder

& entered her blood forever.

She bit his tongue

& changed the tone of his song.

They walked together astonished

not to be lonely.

They sought their lonelinesses

like lost dogs.

But they were joined together

by tongue & shoulder.

His nightmares woke her;

her daydreams startled him.

He fucked so hard

he thought he’d climb back in her.

She came so hard

her skin seemed to dissolve.

She feared she had no yearning

left to write with.

He feared she’d suck him dry

& glide away.

They spoke of all these things

& locked together.

She figured out

the jigsaw of his heart.

& he unscrambled her

& placed the pieces

with such precision

nothing came apart.

The Long Tunnel of Wanting You

This is the long tunnel of wanting you.

Its walls are lined with remembered kisses

wet & red as the inside of your mouth,

full & juicy as your probing tongue,

warm as your belly against mine,

deep as your navel leading home,

soft as your sleeping cock beginning to stir,

tight as your legs wrapped around mine,

straight as your toes pointing toward the bed

as you roll over & thrust your hardness

into the long tunnel of my wanting,

seeding it with dreams & unbearable hope,

making memories of the future,

straightening out my crooked past,

teaching me to live in the present present tense

with the past perfect and the uncertain future

suddenly certain for certain

in the long tunnel of my old wanting

which before always had an ending

but now begins & begins again

with you, with you, with you.

The Muse Who Came to Stay

You are the first muse who came to stay.

The others began & ended with a wish,

or a glance or a kiss between stanzas;

the others strode away in the pointed boots of their fear

or were kicked out by the stiletto heels of mine,

or merely padded away in bare feet

when the ground was too hard or cold

or as hot as white sand baked under the noonday sun.

But you flew in on the wings of your smile,

powered by the engine of your cock,

driven by your lonely pumping heart,

rooted by your arteries to mine.

We became a tree with a double apical point,

reaching equally toward what some call heaven,

singing in the wind with our branches,

sharing the sap & syrup

which makes the trunk grow thick.

We are seeding the ground with poems & children.

We are the stuff of books & new-grown forests.

We are renewing the earth with our roots,

the air with our pure oxygen songs,

the nearby seas with leaves we lose

only to grow the greener ones again.

I used to leap from tree to tree,

speaking glibly of Druids,

thinking myself a latter-day dryad,

or a wood nymph from the stony city,

or some other chimerical creature,

conjured in my cheating poet’s heart.

But now I stay, knowing the muse is mine,

knowing no books will banish him

& no off-key songs will drive him away.

I being & begin; I whistle in & out of tune.

If the ending is near, I do not think of it.

If the drought comes, we will make our own rain.

If the muse is grounded, I will make him fly,

& if he falls, I will catch him in my arms

until he flies with me again.

We Learned

the decorum of fire…

—Pablo Neruda

We learned the decorum of fire,

the flame’s curious symmetry,

the blue heat at the center of the thighs,

the flickering red of the hips,

& the tallow gold of the breasts

lit from within

by the lantern in the ribs.

You tear yourself out of me

like a branch that longs to be grafted

onto a fruit tree,

peach & pear

crossed with each other,

fig & banana served on one plate,

the leaf & the luminous snail

that clings to it.

We learned that the tearing

could be a joining,

that the fire’s flickering

could be a kindling,

that the old decorum of love—

to the into the poem,

leaving the lover lonely with her pen—

was all an ancient lie.

So we banished the evil eye:

you have to be unhappy to create;

you have to let love die before it writes;

you have to lose the joy to have the poem—

& we re-wrote our lives with fire.

See this manuscript covered

with flesh-colored words?

It was written in invisible ink

& held up to our flame.

The words darkened on the page

as we sank into each other.

We are ink & blood

& all things that make stains.

We turn each other golden as we turn,

browning each other’s skins like suns.

Hold me up to the light;

you will see poems.

Hold me in the dark;

you will see light.

Doubts Before Dreaming

Contending with the demon doubt

when all of life heaves up into your mouth,

the lies you spat back with your mother’s milk,

the men you loved & hated & betrayed,

the husbands who slept on through windy nights,

the rattling at the panes…

Pain, doubt, the ache to love again.

The man you cuddled to your chest

who went away…

The demon doubt comes back to haunt your life.

You chose to live, & choosing life meant pain.

♦

Throw out the generalizations!

What you meant—you liar poet—

lyre in your mouth…

You meant: I loved him once

& can no more.

You meant: I kept confusing guilt with love.

♦

This is the problem: that we live;

& as we live each body cell must change.

We dream, & as we dream our dreams must change.

We eat, & in devouring life, we change.

♦

We dream we read our lives in some huge book.

Our dreaming eyelids flick the pages past.

The muse writes through our dreams

& dreams our lives.

The book has pages torn & broken type.

♦

& as we dream, some paragraphs are blurred.

& as we read we re-invent the plot.

The eyes are dreaming cells, the eyelids move.

The cells divide as lovers fall apart.

♦

They slide away to sleep, he slips from her.

He sinks into her dream, her dream is filled.

& as she fills with him, her eyes are changed.

He dreams a woman he has never met.

♦

Nothing can stay: the cock grows soft by dawn.

& she seals over like a virgin raped only by dreams.

However much they cling, they drift apart.

Their hands are joined, their dreaming hearts are severed.

♦

They dance the dance of dreamers as they sleep.

This dreamers’ dance: the pattern of their lives.

The partners change, yet always stay the same.

The partners bow, their hearts collide & break.

♦

Slippers beneath the bed, bare toes toward heaven.

Soles cradled in the sheet, the dancers sleep.

They dream they dance & dance & dance again.

They dream the dance of dreamers without feet.

♦

What is the question here? I cannot say.

I am asleep, my tongue is blurred by death.

I spit the pits of death across the bed.

I love my love, yet eat him while he sleeps.

♦

Death is confusing, life more confusing still.

Alive, we dream, & dead, who can be sure?

Since all we have are dreams, let’s join our beds.

The Dirty Laundry Poem

This is the dirty laundry poem—

because we have traveled from town to town

accumulating soiled linen & sweaty shirts

& blue-jeans caked & clotted with our juice

& teeshirts crumpled by our gloriously messy passion

& underwear made stiff by all our joy.

I have come home to wash my clothes.

They patter on the bathroom floor like rain.

The water drips away the days till you.

The dirty water speaks to me of love.

Steamy in the bubbles of our love,

I have plunged my hands into hot water

as I might plunge them

in your heart.

After years of spots & splatters,

I am finally coming clean.

I will fly to you with a suitcase of fresh laundry,

strip my clothes off, heap them on the floor,

& let you scrub my body with your love.

Sailing Home

In the redwood house sailing off

into the ocean,

I sleep with you—

our dreams mingling,

our breath coming & going

like gusts of wind

trifling with the breakers,

our arms touching

& our legs & our hair

reaching out like tendrils

to intertwine.

The first time

I slept in your arms,

I knew I had come home.

Your body was a ship

& I rocked in it,

utterly safe in the breakers,

utterly sure of this love.

I fit into your arms

as a ship fits into water,

as a cactus roots in sand,

as the sun nestles into the blazing horizon.

The house sails all night.

Our dreams are the flags

of little ships,

your penis the mast

of one of the breeziest sailboats,

& my breasts floating,

half in & half out

of the water,

are like messages in bottles.

There is no point to this poem.

What the sea loses

always turns up again;

it is only a question of shores.

Living Happily Ever After

We used to strike sparks

off each other.

Our eyes would meet

or our hands,

& the blue lightning of love

would sear the air.

Now we are soft.

We loll

in the same sleepy bed,

skin of my skin,

hair of my head,

sweat of my sweat—

you are kin,

brother & mother

all in one,

husband, lover, muse & comforter;

I love you even better

without sparks.

We are pebbles in the tide

rolling against each other.

The surf crashes above us;

the irregular pulse

of the ocean drives our blood,

but we are growing smooth

against each other,

Are we living happily ever after?

What will happen

to my love of cataclysms?

My love of sparks & fire,

my love of ice?

Fellow pebble,

let us roll

against each other.

Perhaps the sparks are clearer

under water.

The Surgery of the Sea

At the furthermost reach of the sea

where Atlantis sinks under the wake of the waves,

I have come to heal my life.

I knit together like a broken arm.

The salt fills in the crevices of bone.

The sea takes all the fragments of my lives

& grinds them home.

I wake up in a waterbed with you.

The sea is singing & my skin

sings against your skin.

The waves are all around us & within.

We sleep stuck to each other’s salt.

I am healing in your arms.

I am learning to write without the loss of love.

I am growing deeper lungs here by the sea.

The waves are knives; they glitter & cut clean.

This is the sea’s surgery.

This is the cutting & the healing both.

This is where bright sunlight warms the bone,

& fog erases us, then makes us whole.

After the Earthquake

After the first astounding rush,

after the weeks at the lake,

the crystal, the clouds, the water lapping the rocks,

the snow breaking under our boots like skin,

& the long mornings in bed…

After the tangos in the kitchen,

& our eyes fixed on each other at dinner,

as if we would eat with our lids,

as if we would swallow each other…

I find you still

here beside me in bed,

(while my pen scratches the pad

& your skin glows as you read)

& my whole life so mellowed & changed

that at times I cannot remember

the crimp in my heart that brought me to you,

the pain of a marriage like an old ache,

a husband like an arthritic knuckle.

Here, living with you,

love is still the only subject that matters.

I open to you like a flowering wound,

or a trough in the sea filled with dreaming fish,

or a steaming chasm of earth

split by a major quake.

You changed the topography.

Where valleys were,

there now are mountains.

Where deserts were,

there now are seas.

We rub each other,

but we do not wear away.

The sand gets finer

& our skins turn silk.

VII

FROM

Witches

(1981)

To the Goddess

Goddess, I come to you

my neck wreathed with rosebuds,

my head filled with visions of infants,

my eyes open to your rays of illumination,

my palms open to your silver nails,

my vagina & my womb gaping

to be filled by your radiance…

O goddess, I would be a worthy vessel.

Impermanence—all is impermanence.

The cock rises to fall again;

the woman fills only to empty

in a convulsion that shakes the world;

the poet grows to become a voice

only to lose that voice when death takes her.

A stroke cancels her upon the page—

& yet I open her book & a chill wind blows from eternity.

Goddess, I come to you

wreathed in tears, in losses, in whistling winds.

I wrap the witch’s herbs around my neck

to ward off the impermanence that is our common fate.

The herbs dry & crumble,

as my face grows the map of my anxieties,

& my daughter leaps up like a vine

twining around the trellis of impermanence.

O goddess, teach me to praise loss,

death & the passing of all things—for from this flux

I know your blessings flow.

To the Horned God

The extinct stars

look down

on the centuries

of the horned God.

From the dark recesses

of the Caverne

des Trois Frères

in Ariège,

to the horned Moses

of Michelangelo,

in Rome,

from the Bull of Minos

& his leaping dancers

poised on the horns

of the dilemma…

From Pan

laughing & fucking

& making light

of all devils,

to the Devil himself,

the Man in Black,

conjured by

the lusts of Christians…

From Osiris

of the upper &

lower kingdoms,

to the Minotaur of azure Crete

& his lost labyrinth…

From Cernunnos

to Satan—

God of dark desires—

what a decline

in horny Gods!

O for a goat to dance with!

O for a circle of witches

skyclad under the horned moon!

Outside my window

hunters are shooting deer.

Thus has your worship sunk.

O God with horns,

come back.

O unicorn in captivity,

come lead us out

of our willful darkness!

Come skewer the sun

with your pointed horns,

& make the cave,

the skull, the pelvic arch

once more

a place of light.

Figure of the Witch

Witch-woman,

tall, slender,

Circe at her loom

or murderous Medea,

Joan at her tree,

listening to voices

in the rustling of the leaves,

like the rustling of the flames

which ignited

her deciduous life…

Witch-woman,

burning goddess,

every woman bears

within her soul

the figure of the witch,

the face of the witch,

beautiful & hideous,

hidden as the lips

of her cunt,

open as her open eyes,

which see the fire

without screaming

as she & the tree, her mother,

are joined again,

seared,

united,

married as a forest

marries air,

only by its burning,

only by its rising

in Demeter’s flaming hands,

only by its leaping

heavenward

in a single

green

flame.

Baby-Witch

Baby-witch,

my daughter,

my worship of the Goddess

alone

condemns you to the fire…

I blow upon

your least fingernail

& it flares cyclamen & rose.

I suck flames from your ears.

I touch your perfect nostrils

& they, too, flame gently

like that pale rose

called “sweetheart.”

Your eyelids are tender purple

like the base of the flame

before it blues.

O child of fire,

O tiny devotee of the Goddess—

I wished for you

to be born a daughter

though we know

that daughters

cannot but be

born for burning

like the fatal

tree.

How to Name Your Familiar

When the devil brings him,

like a Christmas puppy,

examine his downy fur & smell

his small paws for the scent

of sulphur.

Is he a child of hell?

O clearly those soft brown eyes

speak volumes

of deviltry.

O surely those small pink teats

could suckle witches.

O those floppy ears

hear only the devil’s hissing.

O that small pink tongue

will lick & lick at your heart

until only Satan may

slip in.

A fuzzy white dog?

Name him Catch.

A little black kitten?

She is Jamara.

A tiny brown rabbit?

Call her Pyewackett.

Beware, beware—

the soft, the innocent,

the kingdom of cuddly ones—

All these

expose you to the jealous tongues

of neighbors’ flames,

all these

are the devil’s snares!

Familiar familiars—

there is hellfire lurking

in the softest fur,

brimstone in the pinkest tongue,

damnation everlasting

in a purr.

Her Broom, or the Ride of the Witch

My broom

With its tuft of roses

beckoning at the black,

with its crown of thistles,

prickling the sky,

with its carved crescents

winking silverly

at Diana,

with its thick brush

of peacock feathers

sweeping the night,

with its triangle

of glinting fur.

I ride

over the roofs

of doom.

I ride

while he thinks me safe

in our bed.

My forehead

he thinks that scraggly

other broom,

my hips that staff,

my sex that stump

of blackthorn

& of twine.

Ah, I will ride

over the skies—

orange as apricots

slashed red

with pomegranate clouds—

He will think me safe in our bed.

He will think I fear

such fabulous

flight.

It is his bed I fear!

I will burn the clouds

with my marvelous broom.

I will catch Persephone’s seeds

on my flaming tongue.

Ah—if I burn for this,

how beautiful my ashes—

& how beautiful,

my beautiful, comet-tailed

broom!

Love Magick

Oh for a candle I could light

to draw you closer…

Oh for a poppet

made like you,

with your own lovely body

sewn again of cloth,

with your own pale

unseeing eyes,

with your own cock sweetly curving,

remade in wax or clay….

Oh for an herb

to place upon my tongue

to bring your tongue

to mine….

Oh for a potion

I could drink

or slip to you

at some stale

dinner party….

Oh for your nail parings…

Oh for your hairs…

stirred in a brew,

baked in a millet cake….

I would make a stew,

a soup, a witch’s mix

to bring your lovely thighs

on mine.

I would boil bats if not babies

& toads if not theologians

to make you care….

I would enter your blood

like malaria, enter your eyes

like laser beams, enter your palms

like the holy spirit

causing stigmata

to a sex-starved saint!

Oh love,

I would spell you

evol

if mere anagrams

would bring you

near….

But I spell you love

& still

you do not

hear.

Bitter Herb

If you would poison your mind

with the bitter herb of self-hate,

nothing can save you:

not the lover who comes in the night

smelling of pitch & brimstone,

not the husband who comes in the light

smelling of hay & the golden turds of mares,

not the mother with her poisoned apple,

not the daughter with her wreaths of roses & opium poppies,

not the sister with her rosemary & rue,

not the brother with the mandrake root.

Having driven out the demons of the past

we find them now within.

No witches burn in the market

but our minds revolve upon their own spits;

no crucifixion upon Calvary

but a daily torture in the hills of the skull,

no smell of burning female flesh upon the heath,

but the acrid odor of the heart slowly smoldering.

What witchcraft will it take

to bend this world to our will?

Must we burn poisonous herbs

to kill the poisons in the streams?

Must we wear poultices of Henbane

& Deadly Nightshade

against the very air?

O take this garlic rosary,

this token of death’s breath,

this possessed vegetable,

this bulb of dried desire.

I am sick of haunting myself

from within

like an old house.

I would be happier

as a hunted witch.

For All Those Who Died

For all those who died—

stripped naked, shaved, shorn.

For all those who screamed

in vain to the Great Goddess

only to have their tongues

ripped out at the root.

For all those who were pricked, racked, broken on the wheel

for the sins of their Inquisitors.

For all those whose beauty

stirred their torturers to fury;

& for all those whose ugliness did the same.

For all those who were neither ugly nor beautiful,

but only women who would not submit.

For all those quick fingers

broken in the vise.

For all those soft arms

pulled from their sockets.

For all those budding breasts

ripped with hot pincers.

For all those midwives killed merely for the sin

of delivering man

to an imperfect world.

For all those witch-women, my sisters,

who breathed freer

as the flames took them,

knowing as they shed

their female bodies,

the seared flesh falling like fruit

in the flames,

that death alone would cleanse them

of the sin for which they died

the sin of being born a woman,

who is more than the sum

of her parts.

A DEADLY HERBAL IN VERSE

Mandrake

O Mandragora

herbal puppet,

little man dancing

with your great tap root,

small song-&-dance man

cloven-hoofed as the Devil—

no wonder you make such noise!

O Mandrake

putting out fine root hairs…

for centuries

Pythagoras & Theophrastus

sang your praises—

blessed you as aphrodisiac

& soporific,

blasted your resemblance

to man.

Like man you are tricky, devious,

double-natured.

Like man you curse & bless.

Like man you are a poisoner

& a love-bringer.

Like man you take

what you can.

O Mandrake,

bringer of fruitfulness & potency,

lamp in the darkness,

killer of starving dogs,

shrieker, gallowsman, dragon-doll—

in Biblical times,

you were thought beneficent

but gradually the Devil won.

You grew at the foot

of the gallows,

lapping up dead men’s sperm,

giving birth only

to death.

& yet we all give birth to death,

& your other attributes—

O bringer of treasure, sensuality, love,

success in battle—

also lead to death.

So dance, little Mandrake,

in your doubleness.

Rejoice at the gallows’ foot.

You are indeed a dress rehearsal for man,

& we shall join you

soon enough

underground.

Henbane

Herba Apollinaris,

Circe’s herb,

the Delphic Priestesses’

wine—

is it you

with your jagged leaves

& sickly flowers

who turn men

to swine?

Is it you

who pluck the prophecies

from smoke,

above the great Omphalos

in the gorge?

Common as the lowly potato,

but with the power

to bring oblivion or death,

Ulysses lost

his sailors

to your spell,

while that mild witch, Circe,

wove harmonies

upon her magic loom

where the fabric

flickered

like firelight.

Sleepy beasts

beneath her shuttlecock,

the wolves & lions loll

like aging dogs…

the witch tickles

their bellies.

Half girl, half goddess,

all enchantress,

Circe dreams of Odysseus,

luring him

with bright draughts,

bright threads,

& honeyed wine.

Was it you, Henbane,

turning beastly men

to loving beasts?

Is that why Circe

loved you so?

Until Ulysses

stormed in

with his broadsword,

the master mariner,

the son of gods

of old,

& used to taming women

to his will.

He took the witch

to bed—

not out of lust

for Hermes himself had ordered it—

(& Odysseus always

had a god at hand).

Was it Henbane

they smoked

before they went to bed?

Was it Henbane

that let their loving slip

from one slim night

into a whole fat year?

She sent him home

the long way

from her famous

bed of love,

through Death’s cold vastnesses,

& pale Persephone’s glacial halls.

Was it you

Henbane

who made the journey slow—

or was it Circe,

half girl, half goddess,

harmonizing on her lovely loom

while men lolled at her feet

like sleepy beasts…

O Circe,

you knew

a thing or two!

Thorn Apple

Datura stramonium

of the poisonous flowers—

even your smallest buds

are said to cause

madness, sleep & death,

but your spiny “apples,”

prickly & stiff as porcupines,

are the real villains,

& were much beloved

by Kali’s worshipers,

the Thugs.

(O kill, kill, kill

but kill

in a goddess’s name!)

Deadly poison

for arrow tips

& sacrificial victims’ hearts—

you were also used

in love philters!

The cynic laughs,

knowing that love

is the first poison—

the poison

that takes the soul,

the mind,

& all the organs

down below.

(O kill, kill, kill

but kill

in a goddess’s name!)

Venus, Kali, the Great Mother,

the God of the Witches—

what does it matter?

Love potion or poison,

it is the same drink

that brings oblivion

in the end.

Love-will, Sorcerer’s herb,

Jimson weed,

you were used by brothel keepers

to seduce the innocent,

& witches brewed you

for their flying ointments.

The soldiers of Jamestown

made merry with your juice.

It was a new country

but the herbs were old.

The poisons link us

to antiquity—

the poisons & the love philters.

Down through the Ages

we are joined by vines;

we wear garlands

of poisonous berries

like jewels.

Green as innocence,

green as love of death,

we bud, we flower, we fall—

& ancient herbs

grow

out of our blind

eyes.

Deadly Nightshade

When the deadly nightshade flowers,

dreamy-eyed girls

open their lids

for their lovers.

Maenads fall upon men

dripping with dreams.

& children die

from the sweetest

of inky fruits.

Belladonna,

wine of the bacchanals,

you are indeed the witch’s berry,

I look into your open eye & see

Dionysian orgies,

women in love with death,

dying with the widest

& brightest of eyes.

Have you no shame at all

Atropa belladonna?

The other herbs pretend to be angelic,

but you freely play

the Devil’s part.

Dwaleberry, Sorcerer’s cherry,

Murderer’s berry—

your sweetness bursts

on the tongue,

the lungs relax,

& death comes

merely

from refusing

air.

Monkshood

Most beautiful of poisons,

border-plant,

wearing your small green cowl,

little friar, little murderer,

aconitine flows

from your roots

to your deep purple flowers,

small deceiver,

centerpiece

for a poisonous

feast.

A few leaves

in the salad,

a few seeds

in the soup,

a thick root

to flavor

the stock—

& it is all over.

Let the lover beware

who buys you

for love philters.

The dose is deceptive.

One pinch leads to passion

but two will surely lead

to death.

Yet you twinkle

little blue bell

at the edge

of the garden,

wearing no warning

about your slim green neck.

Wolfsbane, Friar’s cap,

Chariot of Venus—

how many may claim

to be poisonous

head to toe?

That honor—

Friar Death—

belongs to you.

VIII

FROM

At the Edge of the Body

(1979)

At the Edge of the Body

At the edge of the body

there is said to be

a flaming halo—

yellow, red, blue

or pure white,

taking its color

from the state

of the soul.

Cynics scoff.

Scientists make graphs

to refute it.

Editorial writers,

journalists, & even

certain poets,

claim it is only mirage,

trumped-up finery,

illusory feathers,

spiritual shenanigans,

humbug.

But in dreams

we see it,

& sometimes even waking.

If the spirit is a bride

about to be married to God,

this is her veil.

Do I believe it?

Do I squint

& regard the perimeter

of my lover’s body,

searching for some sign

that his soul

is about to ignite

the sky?

Without squinting,

I almost see it.

An angry red aura

changing to white,

the color of peace.

I gaze at the place

where he turns into air

& the flames of his skin

combine

with the flames of the sky,

proving

the existence

of both.

Self-Portrait in Shoulder Stand

Old bag of bones

upside down,

what are you searching for

in poetry,

in meditation?

The mother you never had?

The child in you

that you did not conceive?

Death?

Ease from the fear of death?

Revelation?

Dwelling in the house of clouds

where you imagine

you once lived?

“Born alone,

we depart alone.”

Someone said that

during meditation

& I nearly wept.

Oh melancholy lady

behind your clown face,

behind your wisecracks—

how heady it is

to let the ideas rush to your brain!

But even upside down,

you are sad.

Even upside down,

you think of your death.

Even upside down,

you curse the emptiness.

Meditating

on the immobile lotus,

your mind takes flight

like a butterfly

& dabbles in bloodred poppies

& purple heather.

Defying gravity,

defying death,

what makes you think

the body’s riddle

is better solved

upside down?

Blood rushes to your head

like images that come too fast

to write.

After a life held in the double grips

of gravity & time,

after a headfirst birth

out of your mother’s bowels

& into the earth,

you practice for the next.

You make your body light

so that in time,

feet first,

you will be born

into the sky.

My Death

“Death is our eternal companion,” Don Juan said with a most serious air. “It is always to our left, at an arm’s length….It has always been watching you. It always will until the day it taps you.”

—Carlos Castaneda

My death

looks exactly like me.

She lives to my left,

at exactly an arm’s length.

She has my face, hair, hands;

she ages

as I grow older.

Sometimes, at night,

my death awakens me

or else appears in dreams

I did not write.

Sometimes a sudden wind

blows from nowhere,

& I look left

& see my death.

Alive, I write

with my right hand only.

When I am dead,

I shall write with my left.

But later I will have to write

through others.

I may appear

to future poets

as their deaths.

Zen & the Art of Poetry

Letting the mind go,

letting the pen, the breath,

the movement of images in & out

of the mouth

go calm, go rhythmic

as the rise & fall of waves,

as one sits in the lotus position

over the world,

holding the pen so lightly

that it scarcely stains the page,

holding the breath

in the glowing cage of the ribs,

until the heart

is only a living lantern

fueled by breath,

& the pen writes

what the heart wills

& the whole world goes out,

goes black,

but for the hard, clear stars

below.

The Xylophone of the Spine

The cosmos has played

on the xylophone

of my spine,

hitting each vertebra

with a single clear-pitched tone,

making my backbone

reverberate

with the fleshly echo

of the music

of the spheres.

When the flesh falls from these bones,

the notes will be clearer.

When the skin withers

& the spirit sails out

clear as the autumn air,

crisp as the falling leaves,

shining as the waters of our planet

seen from afar

by creatures who are made

of melody,

& who are invisible,

untouchable & far

except when they come to earth

to make music

on our fragile bones.

Aura

I sit in the black leather chair

meditating

on the plume of smoke that rises

in the air,

riffling the pages of my life

as if it were a book of poems,

flipping through

past & future.

If I go back, back, back,

riding the plume of smoke,

I find I died

in childbirth in another life,

died by fire in the life before that,

died by water twice, or more.

I pick out days

& relive them

as if I were trying on dresses.

When the future beckons,

I follow,

riding another plume of smoke,

feeling the barrier

between skin & air

evaporate,

& my body disappear

like the myth it is.

My cheeks burn against the air,

flaming where two elements collide

& intermingle

becoming one.

Oh explosion at the body’s edge!

I live on a ledge of time,

gazing

at the infinite.

The Keys

Broken ivories

playing

the blue piano

of the sea.

We have come

from the bitter city

to heal ourselves.

We have come

looking for a patch of beach

not yet built into a fortress

of real-estate greed,

a coral reef

not yet picked clean

of buried treasure,

not yet bare of birds.

The first night in the Keys,

I dreamed I was a bird

soaring over a hilly city,

soaring & dipping

like a gull or egret.

& I thought:

“Ah—this is a flying dream!

Enjoy it.”

But I really think

that my soul

had been transported

for a night

into the body of

a bird

& I was flying.

I woke up

exhausted,

arms weary,

eyes red.

The beach was dazzling

with its white sand,

the sun blinding,

& I seemed to know the palm trees

from above

as well as below.

They root in the sand

with elephant feet,

yet they also root

their delicate fronds

in air.

& these are a comfort

as you fly

half bird, half human

through a dream of sky.

Everything was new

to a spirit

so divided

between two kingdoms.

The water was alive

with fish,

the air with birds

& palm fronds,

clouds, thunderous presences

of rain

gathering & parting,

& fiery sun playing through.

I knew

that I stood

on a patch of earth

connected to the sky,

that my heart beat

with the sea,

that my arms moved

with the clouds,

that my flesh

was finally irrelevant

though it surrounded me

as the case of a piano

surrounds its strings,

while the fingers play

on the ivory keys

& the human music

rises to the sky.

The Poetry Suit

I put on my poetry suit.

The prose falls away

like a dream I cannot remember,

the images unraveling like threads

in a cheap dress, sewn in Hong Kong

to feed the hungry mouths

of sweet-faced Chinese children.

Now I am in my poetry suit.

I zip myself into it,

pink as flesh, tight as the suit

I was born in, & looking

seamless as a perfect poem,

gleaming as the golden fleece,

slim as a stripper at the Crazy Horse Saloon,

transparent as silk stockings,

& smelling of jasmine & tea rose.

But what was that old perfume

I left in the pocket,

that cotton ball soaked

in Bal à Versailles,

that yellowing glacé glove

that lacks a mate,

that fine cambric handkerchief

brown with dried blood

from an old nosebleed?

Even poetry, pure as nothing

but snow or music,

drags life along

in its hidden pockets.

Oh for an art

that is not made of words

with all their odors

& indiscretions.

The Buddha in the Womb

Bobbing in the waters of the womb,

little godhead, ten toes, ten fingers

& infinite hope,

sails upside down through the world.

My bones, I know, are only a cage

for death.

Meditating, I can see my skull,

a death’s head,

lit from within

by candles

which are possibly the suns

of other galaxies.

I know that death

is a movement toward light,

a happy dream

from which you are loath to awaken,

a lover left

in a country

to which you have no visa,

& I know that the horses of the spirit

are galloping, galloping, galloping

out of time

& into the moment called NOW.

Why then do I care

for this upside-down Buddha

bobbling through the world,

his toes, his fingers

alive with blood

that will only sing & die.

There is a light in my skull

& a light in his.

We meditate on our bones only

to let them blow away

with fewer regrets.

Flesh is merely a lesson.

We learn it

& pass on.

Without Parachutes

The experiencer of fear is not an observer of it; he is fear itself, the very instrument of fear.

—J. Krishnamurti

In dreams I descend

into the cave of my past:

a child with a morgue-tag

on its toe,

the terrible metal squeaking

of the morgue-drawers,

& the chilly basement

& the slam of doors.

Or else I am setting up dreamhouse,

with the wife

of my second ex-husband.

She complains of him

with breaking sorrow—

& I comfort her.

(She only married him, it seems, for me.)

Sometimes I wake up naked

in Beverly Hills—

the table set for ten, a formal dinner—

a studio chief on my left side,

a fabled actor on my right.

Across the table,

Greta Garbo, Scott Fitzgerald,

John F. Kennedy & Marilyn Monroe—

& I alone not properly dressed for dinner,

& besides unprepared

for the final exam,

in which our immortality

will be tested,

& one of us shall perish

as dessert.

Send parachutes & kisses!

Send them quick!

I am descending into the cave

of my own fear.

My feet are weighted

with the leg-irons of the past.

The elevator plummets

in the shaft.

Trapped, trapped in the bowels

of my dream,

locked in the cellar

by myself the jailer.

Rats and spiders scuttle

through the coal bin.

I cower in the corner.

I am fear.

If God Is a Dog

If God is a dog drowsing

contemplating

the quintessential dogginess

of the universe, of the whole

canine race, why are we

uneasy?

No dog I know

would hurl thunderbolts,

or plant plague germs,

or shower us with darts

of pox or gonococci.

No. He lies on his back

awaiting

the cosmic belly rub.

He wags his tail signifying

universal love.

He frolics and cavorts

because he has just

taken a galactic shit

& found it good.

All dogs are blessed;

they live in the now.

But God is all too human.

Somehow we have spelled his name

wrong, got it backward,

aroused his growl.

God drowses

like a lazy old man

bored

with our false

alarms.

Best Friends

We made them

in the image of our fears

to cry at doors,

at partings—even brief,

to beg for food at table,

& to look at us with those big

aching eyes,

& stay beside us

when our children flee,

& sleep upon our beds

on darkest nights,

& cringe at thunder

as in our own

childhood

frights.

We made them sad-eyed,

loving, loyal, scared

of life without us.

We nurtured their dependency

& grief.

We keep them as reminders of our fear.

We love them

as the unacknowledged hosts

of our own terror

of the grave—abandonment.

Hold my paw

for I am dying.

Sleep upon my coffin;

wait for me,

sad-eyed

in the middle of the drive

that curves beyond the cemetery wall.

I hear your bark,

I hear your mournful howl—

oh may all dogs that I have ever loved

carry my coffin,

howl at the moonless sky,

& lie down with me sleeping

when I die.

The Exam Dream

In a season of deaths,

when the dead ones, the great ones

were falling all around,

when the leaves were turning

scarlet, crimson, brown as blood,

when the birches trembled

& the oaks turned gold,

I dreamed,

perhaps for the last time,

the old exam-dream:

a history course

& I had not read a word.

Though I took my degree Phi Bete

with every honor,

I trembled in my dream

that I would fail.

Oh the terror

in the college corridor!

The fear of reprisals,

the fear of death.

The history of the world

is blank to me.

The only thing I know

is certain

death.

How are we tested?

Why do our minds

go blank?

Why the exam room,

courtroom,

why the witness stand?

Even the Phi Bete kids

must fail in dreams;

A’s & F’s are equalized

by sleep.

Perhaps we are tested by mortality.

No childhood of anxiety

& pain,

no eyes behind glasses

searching flyspeck print

can spare us

from the certain truth

we fail.

Teach us to live

each day

as if our last.

Teach us the present tense,

teach us the word.

Teach us to take air in

& let it out

without the fearful catch

of breath on death.

Truce with the cosmos,

soul at peace within,

we may stop dreaming

that we fail

life’s school.

Our lives are in your hands,

our deaths assured.

Between this knowledge

& our schooldays

fall our dreams.

His Tuning of the Night

All night he lies awake tuning the sky,

tuning the night with its fat crackle of static,

with its melancholy love songs crooning

across the rainy air above Verdun

& the autobahn’s blue suicidal dawn.

Wherever he lives there is the same unwomaned bed,

the ashtrays overflowing their reproaches,

his stained fingers on the tuning bar, fishing

for her voice in a deep mirrorless pond,

for the tinsel & elusive fish

(brighter than pennies in water & more wished upon)—

the copper-colored daughter of the pond god.

He casts for her, the tuning bar his rod,

but only long-dead lovers with their griefs

haunt him in Piaf’s voice—

(as if a voice could somehow only die

when it was sung out, utterly).

He finally lies down and drowns the light

but the taste of her rises, brackish,

from the long dark water of her illness

& his grief is terrible as drowning

when he reaches for the radio again.

In the daytime, you hardly know him;

he walks in a borrowed calm.

You cannot sense

his desperation in the dawn

when the abracadabras of the birds

conjure another phantom day.

He favors cities which blaze all night,

hazy mushrooms of light under the blue

& blinking eyes of jets.

But when the lamps across the way go under,

& the floorboards settle,

& the pipes fret like old men gargling—

he is alone with his mouthful of ghosts,

his tongue bitter with her unmourned death,

& the terrible drowning.

I watch from my blue window

knowing he does not trust me,

though I know him as I know my ghosts,

though I know his drowning,

though, since that night when all harmony broke for me,

I have been trying to tune the sky.

The Deaths of the Goddesses

It used to be hard

for women,

snowed in their white lives,

white lies,

to write books

with that fine frenzy

which commends genius

to posterity,

yet estranges it

from its closest

friends.

Women were friends to all,

& being too friendly

they could not command

the unfriendly prerogatives

of genius,

though some were

geniuses still,

destroying

only themselves

with the torment

of the unfriendly ghost

trapped in a friendly

form.

Oh the women who died

dissembling friendship

for the world!

Oh the women who turned

the dagger inward

when it wished

to go out,

who impaled themselves

on Womanhood itself!

No vampire

could be

as greedy for blood,

no father or husband

as bullying.

A woman punishing herself

with her own pain

is a fierce opponent indeed.

It is self against self,

dagger to dagger,

blood of her blood,

blood of her daughter,

blood of her mother,

her menses, her moon,

all pooled together,

one crimson sea.

It is the awful auto da fé,

the sublime seppuku,

Santa Sebastiana

as archer

& victim too.

The arrow flies from her bow.

She runs, fleet as Diana,

& stops it

with her breast.

Enough!

cried the Women-Who-Cared.

Henceforth we will turn

our anger where it belongs.

We will banish the whitest lies.

We will speak the black truth as it is.

Our fathers—we spit back their sperm.

Our husbands—we spit back their names.

Our brothers—we suck back our love.

The self-righteous inherit the earth,

& anger speaks louder than love.

Love is a softness

the weak cannot afford,

& sex a Darwinian bribe.

But who wants the earth as a gift

when it is empty as space,

when women grow hard

as bronze madonnas

& Diana loves only her stag?

When Persephone stays in hell

the entire year,

then how can spring

begin?

The Truce Between the Sexes

For a long time unhappy

with my man,

I blamed men,

blamed marriage, blamed

the whole bleeding world,

Because I could not lie in bed with him

without lying to him

or else to myself,

& lying to myself

became increasingly hard

as my poems

struck rock.

My life & my poems lived apart;

I had to marry them,

& marrying them

meant divorcing him,

divorcing the lie.

Now I lie in bed

with my poems on the sheets

& a man I love

sleeping or reading

at my side.

Because I love him,

I do not think of him

as “Men,”

but as my friend.

Hate generalizes;

love is particular.

He is not Men, man, male—

all those maddening m’s

muttering like machine-gun spittle,

but only a person like me,

dreaming, vulnerable, scared,

his dreams

opening into rooms

where the chairs

are wishes you can sit on

& the rugs are wonderful

with oriental birds.

The first month we lived together

I was mad with joy,

thinking that a person with a penis

could dream, tell jokes, even cry.

Now I find it usual,

& when other women sputter

of their rage,

I look at them blankly,

half comprehending

those poor medieval creatures

from a dark, dark age.

I wonder about myself.

Was I always so fickle?

Must politics always be personal?

If I struck oil,

would I crusade

for depletion allowances?

Erica, Erica,

you are hard on yourself.

Lie back & enjoy the cease-fire.

Trouble will come again.

Sex will grow horns & warts.

The white sheets of this bed

will be splattered with blood.

Just wait.

But I don’t believe it.

There will be trouble enough,

but a different sort.

Depression in Early Spring

Meathooks, notebooks,

the whole city sky palely flaming

& spectral bombs

hitting that patch of river

I see from my eastern window.

The poets are dead, the city dying.

Anne, Sylvia, Keats

with his passionate lungs,

Berryman jumping from the bridge & waving,

all the dreamers dead

of their own dreams.

Why have I stayed on as Horatio?

Anne sends poems from the grave,

Sylvia, letters.

John Keats’s ghostly cough

comes through the wall board.

What am I doing here?

Why contend?

I am a corpse who moves a pen that writes.

I am a vessel for a voice that echoes.

I write a novel & annihilate whole forests.

I rearrange the cosmos by an inch.

Blood & Honey

I began by loving women

& the love turned

to bitterness.

My mother, the bitter,

whose bitter lesson—

trust no one,

especially no one male—

caused me to be naive

for too many years,

in mere rebellion

against that bitterness.

If she was Medea,

I would be Candide

& bleed in every sexual war,

& water my garden with menstrual blood

& grow the juiciest fruits.

(Like the woman

who watered her roses with blood

& won all the prizes,

though no one knew why.)

If she was Lady Macbeth,

I would be Don Quixote—

& never pass up a windmill

without a fight,

& never choose discretion

over valor.

My valor was often foolish.

I was rash

(though others called me brave).

My poems were red flags

To lure the bulls.

The picadors smelled blood

& jabbed my novels.

I had only begun

by loving women—

& ended by hating their deceit,

hating the hate

they feed their daughters,

hating the self-hate

they feed themselves,

hating the contempt

they feed their men,

as they claim weakness—

their secret strength.

For who can be cruder

than a woman

who is cruel

out of her impotence?

& who can be meaner

than a woman

who desires

the only room with a view?

Even in chess

she shouts:

“Off with their heads!”

& the poor king

walks one step forward,

one step back.

But I began

by loving women,

loving myself

despite my mother’s lesson,

loving my ten fingers,

ten toes, my puckered navel,

my lips that are too thick

& my eyes the color of ink.

Because I believed in them,

I found gentle men.

Because I loved myself,

I was loved.

Because I had faith,

the unicorn licked my arm,

the rabbit nestled in my skirts,

the griffin slept

curled up at the bottom

of my bed.

Bitter women,

there is milk under this poem.

What you sow in blood

shall be harvested in honey.

Woman Enough

Because my grandmother’s hours

were apple cakes baking,

& dust motes gathering,

& linens yellowing

& seams and hems

inevitably unraveling—

I almost never keep house—

though really I like houses

& wish I had a clean one.

Because my mother’s minutes

were sucked into the roar

of the vacuum cleaner,

because she waltzed with the washer-dryer

& tore her hair waiting for repairmen—

I send out my laundry,

& live in a dusty house,

though really I like clean houses

as well as anyone.

I am woman enough

to love the kneading of bread

as much as the feel

of typewriter keys

under my fingers—

springy, springy.

& the smell of clean laundry

& simmering soup

are almost as dear to me

as the smell of paper and ink.

I wish there were not a choice;

I wish I could be two women.

I wish the days could be longer.

But they are short.

So I write while

the dust piles up.

I sit at my typewriter

remembering my grandmother

& all my mothers,

& the minutes they lost

loving houses better than themselves—

& the man I love cleans up the kitchen

grumbling only a little

because he knows

that after all these centuries

it is easier for him

than for me.

Assuming Our Dominance

Assuming our dominance

over the creatures of earth—

dog, cat, sparrow,

tiny field mouse

(who lives in our kitchen

as a blur of light

running past the edges

of our sight)—

how can we understand humility?

The mouse-droppings

in the silverware drawer

annoy us.

The infinite insects

creep out of the walls

one by one,

only to be slammed

under our soles.

Our souls are heavy

with the deaths of animals.

Ocelot, beaver, fox

& even the ugly

slant-eyed mink

give their skins

to women

who are no more beautiful to God

than they.

The lowly roach,

or the tick

that seeks admission to our bed

on the back of a gentle dog,

is beloved by some creator.

Assuming our dominance

has made us mad,

has made the fragrant earth

into a place

where the mice that fill the edges

of our eyes

& scuttle past our countertops

& dreams—

are fears, the lurking fears

of our own kind.

House-Hunting in the Bicentennial Year

Looking for a home, America,

we have split & crisscrossed

you from your purple seashores

to your nongrip, nonslip

motel bathrooms,

from the casinos at Reno

to the crystalline shores of Lake Tahoe,

from the giant duck in Southampton

(which is really an egg shop)

to the giant hotdog in L.A.

(which is really a hotdog stand)

to the giant artichoke in Castroville, CA,

the heart of the artichoke

country,

& still we are homeless

this 1976.

America,

we have met your brokers.

They are fiftyish ladies in hairnets,

or fiftyish ladies in blue & silver hair like mink coats

or flirty fiftyish ladies

getting blonder every winter.

They tout your federal brickwork

& your random hand-pegged floorboards.

Like witches, they advertise your gingerbread houses,

your “high ranches,” your split-levels,

your Victorians, your widows’ walks,

your whaling towns,

instead of wailing walls,

your Yankee New England spunk,

your hospitality, your tax rates,

your school systems,

with or without busing,

your friendly dogs

& philosophical cats.

America,

we have ridden through your canyons,

passes, dried-up rivers,

past your flooded quarries, through your eroded arroyos.

We have sighted UFOs on the beach

at Malibu

& swum from pool to pool

like any Cheever hero

& lusted in motels like any Updike Christian.

America,

the open road is closing,

a tollbooth blocks the vista,

& even the toilets are pumped

with dimes as well as shit.

The fried clams on Cape Cod

are pressed from clam scraps.

The California carrot cake is rumored

to be made of soy.

The dreaming towers of Gotham

are sunk in garbage,

the bedrock softens,

the buildings list like drunks,

the Thanksgiving balloons are all deflated,

the Christmas trees don’t even pretend to be green.

But we love you, America,

& we’ll keep on hunting.

The dream house that we seek is just next door.

Switzerland is a heaven of chocolates

& tax breaks.

Barbados is sweet & black & tax-free.

Antigua is Britain by the sea.

But we’re sticking around, America,

for the next earthquake,

kissing the ground

for the next Fourth of July.

We love you, America,

& we’ll keep hunting.

There’s a dream house waiting for us somewhere

with blooming cherry trees

& a FOR SALE sign,

with picture windows facing the Pacific

& dormer windows facing the Atlantic,

with coconut palms & flaming maples,

with shifting sand dunes

& canyons blazing with mustard,

with rabbits & rattlesnakes & nonpoisonous scorpions,

with raccoons who rattle the garbage

& meekly feeding deer who lap at salt licks

& pheasants who hop across the lawn in two-steps,

with loving dogs & aloof, contemplative cats,

with heated swimming pool & sauna

& an earthquake-proof Jacuzzi,

with carpeted carport & bathrooms

& plumbing so good it hums,

with neighbors who lend you organic sugar

& mailmen who are often women,

with huge supermarkets selling wine & kneesocks,

mangoes, papayas, & dogfood in fifty flavors,

with nearby movie theaters playing Bergman & Fellini

without dubbing,

with resident symphony orchestras

down the block,

but no rock stars living right next door.

We know we’ll find you someday

if not in this life, America,

then in the next,

if not in this solar system,

then in another.

We’re ready to move, America.

We’ve called our unscrupulous movers

who always break everything & demand to be paid in cash,

& we have our downpayment in hand.

We lust for a big fat mortgage.

We’ve pulled up our city roots

& we’ve packed our books, our banjo & our dog

in a bright red gypsy wagon

with low gas mileage.

All we need is the house,

all we need is the listing.

We’re ready to move, America,

but we don’t know

where.

January in New York

…the night travels in its black ship…

—Pablo Neruda

Black ship of night

sailing through the world

& the moon an orange slice

tangy to the teeth

of lovers who lie

under it,

sucking it.

Somewhere there are palm trees;

somewhere the sea

bluely gathers itself up

& lets itself fall again

into green;

somewhere the spangles

of light on the ocean

dazzle the eyes;

but here in the midnight city,

the black ship of night

has docked

for a long, dark stay,

& even the citrus moon

with its pockets of juice

cannot sweeten the dark.

Then the snow begins,

whirling over the Pole,

gathering force over Canada,

sprinkling the Great Lakes with sugar

which drowns in their deep black cups;

it is drawn to the spires of New York

& the flurries come

scampering at first,

lighthearted, crystalline, white,

but finally

sucked into the city

as into a black hole

in space.

The sky is suddenly pink—

pink as flesh: breasts,

babies’ bottoms. Night is

day; day is whiter than the desert;

the city stops like a heart;

pigeons dip & veer

& come to rest

under the snow-hatted

watertanks.

New England Winter

Testing the soul’s mettle,

the frost heaves

holes in the roads

to the heart,

the glass forest

raises up its branches

to praise all things

that catch the light

then melt.

The forest floor is white,

but here & there a boulder rises

with its glacial arrogance

& brooks that bubble

under sheets of ice

remind us that the tundra of the soul

will soften

just a little

towards the spring.

Jubilate Canis

(With apologies to Christopher Smart)

For I will consider my dog Poochkin

(& his long-lost brothers, Chekarf & Dogstoyevsky).

For he is the reincarnation of a great canine poet.

For he barks in meter, & when I leave him alone

his yelps at the door are epic.

For he is white, furry & resembles a bathmat.

For he sleeps at my feet as I write

& therefore is my greatest critic.

For he follows me into the bathroom

& faithfully pees on paper.

For he is almost housebroken.

For he eats the dogfood I give him

but also loves Jarlsberg and Swiss cheese.

For he disdains nothing that reeks—

whether feet or roses.

For to him, all smells are created equal by God—

both turds and perfumes.

For he loves toilet bowls no less than soup bowls.

For by watching him, I have understood democracy.

For by stroking him, I have understood joy.

For he turns his belly toward God

& raises his paws & penis in supplication.

For he hangs his pink tongue out of his mouth

like a festival banner for God.

For though he is male, he has pink nipples on his belly

like the female.

For though he is canine, he is more humane

than most humans.

For when he dreams he mutters in his sleep

like any poet.

For when he wakes he yawns & stretches

& stands on his hind legs to greet me.

For, after he shits, he romps and frolics

with supreme abandon.

For, after he eats, he is more contented

than any human.

For in every room he will find the coolest corner,

& having found it, he has the sense to stay there.

For when I show him my poems,

he eats them.

For an old shoe makes him happier than a Rolls-Royce

makes a rock star.

For he has convinced me of the infinite wisdom

of dog-consciousness.

For, thanks to Poochkin, I praise the Lord

& no longer fear death.

For when my spirit flees my body through my nostrils,

may it sail into the pregnant belly

of a furry bitch,

& may I praise God always

as a dog.

I Live in New York

I am happiest

near the ocean,

where the changing light

reminds me of my death

& the fact that it need not be fatal—

yet I perch here

in the midst of the city

where the traffic dulls my senses,

where my ears scream at sirens,

where transistor radio blasts

invade my poems

like alien war chants.

But I never walk

the streets of New York

without hoping for the end

of the world.

How many years

before the streets return to flowers?

How many centuries

before the towers fall?

In my mind’s eye,

New York falls to ruins.

Butterflies alight upon the stones

and poppies spring

out of the asphalt fields.

Why do I stay here

when I love the ocean?

Because the ocean lulls me

with its peace.

Eternity is coming soon enough.

As monks sleep

in their own coffins,

I live in New York.

Flight to Catalina

On a darkening planet

speeding

toward our death,

we pierce a rosy cloud

& hit clean air,

we glide above

the red infernal smog,

we leave the mammon city

far behind.

Here—where the air is clear

as nothing,

where cactus pads

are prickly as stars,

where buffalo chips

are gilded by the sun

& the moon tastes like a peppermint—

we land.

“Have we flown to heaven?”

I inquired

(& meant it).

The airport was a leveled

mountaintop.

We took the cloudbank

at a tilt

& bumped the runway

just ten degrees from crashing,

certain death.

If I’m to die, God,

let me die flying!

Fear is worse than death—

I know that now.

The cloudbanks of my life

have silver linings.

Beyond them:

cactus pads,

clear earth,

dear sky.

Good Carpenters

I mourn a dead friend, like myself, a good carpenter.

—Pablo Neruda about César Vallejo

I looked at the book.

“It will stand,” I thought.

Not a palace

built by a newspaper czar,

nor a mud hovel

that the sea will soften,

but a good house of words

near the sea

with everything plumb.

That is the most I can ask.

I have cut the wood myself

from my own forests,

I have sanded it smooth

with the grain.

I have left knotholes

for the muse to whistle through

—old siren that she is.

At least the roof does not leak.

& the fireplace is small

but it draws.

The wind whips the house

but it stands.

& the waves lick

the pilings

with their tongues

but at least they do not suck me

out to sea.

The sea is wordless

but it tries to talk to us.

We carpenters are also translators.

We build with sounds, with whispers & with wind.

We try to speak the language of the sea.

We want to build to last

yet change forever.

We want to be as endless as the sea.

& yet she mocks us

with her barnacles & rust stains;

she tells us what we build will also fall.

Our words are grains of sand,

our walls are wood,

our windowpanes are sprayed with solemn salt.

We whisper, as we build, “Forever please,”

—by which we mean at least for thirty years.

People Who Live

People who live by the sea

understand eternity.

They copy the curves of the waves,

their hearts beat with the tides,

& the saltiness of their blood

corresponds with the sea.

They know that the house of flesh

is only a sandcastle

built on the shore,

that skin breaks

under the waves

like sand under the soles

of the first walker on the beach

when the tide recedes.

Each of us walks there once,

watching the bubbles

rise up through the sand

like ascending souls,

tracing the line of the foam,

drawing our index fingers

along the horizon

pointing home.

Unrequited

Parachuting

down through clouds

shaped like whales & sharks,

dolphins & penguins,

pelicans & gulls,

we reach

the purple hills

of a green-hearted island

ringed

with volcanic rock

bathed

by cobalt waters

reefed

by whitest coral

tenanted

by sea urchins & sponge

& visited

by barracuda

& tourists.

The dictator

of this island

is the sun.

The Secret Police

is the sweet

fragrance of cane.

Frangipani grows

in the uplands;

the salt flats

reek

by the sea.

I want to buy it,

to hide here,

to stay,

to teach all the people

to write,

to orchestrate the stars

in the palm trees

& teach the jellyfish

not to bite.

Oh dark volcanic

wine!

Oh collapsed parachute

filled with kisses!

Oh blue-bottle bits

ground

into jewels

by the sand!

Whoever loves islands

must love the sea,

& the sea

loves no one

but herself.

Summoning the Muse to a New House

Woodsprites

& deer arrive;

raccoons hitch a night ride

in the still car

& eat all the Life Savers

from the glove compartment;

woodchucks feast

on the vegetable seedlings;

a swarm of honeybees

breaks loose from a neighboring hive

& storms my third-floor

study window

in search of honey;

a bitch in heat

seeks out

our horny dog;

a hawk nests

in the fir tree

outside my window;

spiders weave

& spin their webs

from book to book,

from typewriter to ceiling beam;

but still the muse—

recalcitrant & slow—

does not arrive.

Her skirts snag

on the Rocky Mountains,

her blue hair trails

into the Pacific.

“You move too often,”

she accuses;

“I just get acclimated,

then you move again!”

Bitter muse,

you ought to be portable

as a typewriter.

You ought to be

transient as a spy,

adaptable as a diplomat,

self-effacing as the perfect

valet—

but you are not.

After all,

you are our mother;

unless we listen & obey,

you let us starve.

Come—there is honey here,

or at least, bees.

The honey’s

in the making

if you come.

IX

FROM

Ordinary Miracles

(1983)

Ordinary Miracles

Spring, rainbows,

ordinary miracles

about which

nothing new can be said.

The stars on a clear night

of a New England winter;

the soft air of the islands

along the old

Spanish Main;

pirate gold shining

in the palm;

the odor of roses

to the lover’s nose…

There is no more poetry

to be written

of these things.

The rainbow’s sudden revelation—

behold!

the cliché is true!

What can one say

but that?

So too

with you, little heart,

little miracle,

but you are

no less miracle

for being ordinary.

The Birth of the Water Baby

Little egg,

little nub,

full complement of

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.

Another Language

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.

Anti-Conception

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

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.

Anti-Matter

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.

Nursing You

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.

On Reading a Vast Anthology

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.

This Element

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.

On the Avenue

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.

What You Need to Be a Writer

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.

Letter to My Lover After Seven Years

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

lose, losses, limbo.

I stand on a ledge in hell

still howling for our love.

If You Come Back

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

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

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.

For Molly, Concerning God

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.

Poem for Molly’s Fortieth Birthday

“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?

The Horse from Hell

(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)

A Biography of Erica Jong

ERICA JONG 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.

Erica Jong followed Isadora Wing through three additional novels, How to Save Your Own Life, Parachutes & Kisses, and Any Woman’s Blues. She has also published eight award-winning volumes of poetry and written brilliant historical fiction, like Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones, a fantasy about what would have happened if Fielding’s Tom Jones had been a woman. She has written a glittering novel about sixteenth-century Venice (where she has spent many summers), Shylock’s Daughter or Serenissima, and an amazing recreation of ancient Greece, entitled Sappho’s Leap. Her moving memoir, Fear of Fifty, and her writer’s meditation on the craft, Seducing the Demon, have also been bestsellers in the United States and abroad. Her most recent publication is an anthology of women writing about the best sex they’ve ever had, Sugar in my Bowl.

Dividing her time between New York City and Weston, Connecticut, Jong lives with her husband, famed divorce attorney Ken Burrows, and a standard poodle named Belinda Barkowitz. Jong’s daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, is also a writer, and the mother of Jong’s three grandchildren, an eight-year-old and four-year-old twins.

Jong posing in her grandfather’s portrait studio at a young age. Jong grew up in Manhattan’s Upper West Side and enjoyed a childhood of music lessons, skating lessons, summer camps, and art school.

Jong at age eleven or twelve, meditating on her future as a writer—and perhaps which nail polish to try next.

Jong in her early teens at her parents’ twenty-fifth anniversary party. Looking back at the photograph, Jong surmises that her mellow expression means she was likely drunk for the first time.

Jong, age sixteen, in her high school graduation picture. She attended New York’s prestigious High School of Music & Art. A progressive school, it was full of passionate, talented kids and known for being racially integrated in a time when many schools were not.

A page from the first completed manuscript of Fear of Flying. Jong worked on the novel throughout her twenties, going through many drafts before she arrived at the framing device of a trip through Europe, and the story of Isadora’s past told through flashbacks.

The publicity photo used for Fear of Flying. The photograph defined Jong to millions of readers worldwide, leading many to think of her as carefree when, in reality, she was a workaholic—always writing the next book!

Jong in the mid 1970s, photographed by science-fiction author and future husband Jonathan Fast, who had a matching hat. Fast took the photograph around the time the two fell madly in love.

Jong at her house in Connecticut in August 1978, just a few days before giving birth to her daughter, Molly Jong-Fast. Jong was in her thirties at the time, and ready to have a baby. She loved the way she looked in her Indian schmatta and never took it off. She remembers her pregnancy with Molly as a very happy time.

Jong and her daughter, Molly, in 1982, smiling with Emily Doggenson, Jong’s second Bichon Frisé. This picture was used as a holiday card, and then in magazines. Jong says she wondered if it was so beloved because mother, daughter, and dog all shared the same hair.

A promotional photograph of Jong taken in her writing studio. When really writing, she worked in solitude and pajamas—like most authors, she says.

Jong around 1988, looking at artwork by Joseph Smith created for her illustrated book Witches. Jong explored the work of many artists, but in the end, she selected Smith’s work because she found his illustrations to be both spooky and sexy at the same time.

Jong at the Hôtel de Crillion, photographed for a newspaper feature. Jong liked this photograph so much that she used it in her poetry book Becoming Light.

Jong in Mishkenot Sha’ananim, Israel, for a literature festival. Jong has also taught at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be’er Sheva, Israel.

Jong and Ken Burrows in their book-lined apartment. They collect rare first editions of Joyce, Eliot, Dickens, Beckett, Miller, Updike, Nabokov, and Radclyffe Hall.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1961, 1962, 1971, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1979, 1981, 1983, 1987, 1991 by Erica Mann Jong

Copyright © 1968, 1969, 1973, 1974, 1975, by Erica Mann Jong

Cover design by Connie Gabbert

978-1-4804-3889-7

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com

EBOOKS BY ERICA JONG

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