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.
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poem by Erica Jong
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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
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poem by Erica Jong
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Sexual Soup
A man so sick that the sexual soup
cannot save him -
the chicken soup of sex
which cures everything:
tossed mane of noodles,
bits of pale white meat.
the globules of yellow fat
like love...
But he is a man so sick
no soup can save him.
His throat has healed into a scar.
Rage fills his guts.
He wants to diet on dust.
I offered to feed him
(spoon by spoon)
myself.
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poem by Erica Jong
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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
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poem by Erica Jong
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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
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poem by Erica Jong
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Playing with the Boys
All the boring tedious young men
with dead eyes & dirty hair . . .
all the mad young men who hate their mothers,
all the squalling baby boys . . .
have grown up
& now write book reviews
or novels about the life
of the knife-fighter,
or movies in which grown men
torture each other-
all the squalling boring baby boys!
I am not part of their game.
I have no penis.
I have a pen, two eyes
& I bleed monthly.
When the moon shines on the sea
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poem by Erica Jong
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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
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poem by Erica Jong
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Climbing You
I want to understand the steep thing
that climbs ladders in your throat.
I can't make sense of you.
Everywhere I look you're there--
a vast landmark, a volcano
poking its head through the clouds,
Gulliver sprawled across Lilliput.
I climb into your eyes, looking.
The pupils are black painted stage flats.
They can be pulled down like window shades.
I switch on a light in your iris.
Your brain ticks like a bomb.
In your offhand, mocking way
you've invited me into your chest.
Inside: the blur that poses as your heart.
I'm supposed to go in with a torch
or maybe hot water bottles
& defrost it by hand
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poem by Erica Jong
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What You Need to Be A Writer
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:
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poem by Erica Jong
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Still Life with Tulips
Because you did, I too arrange flowers,
Watching the pistils just 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.
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poem by Erica Jong
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