Hotel Rooms
'Hotel rooms constitute a separate moral universe.'
-Tom Stoppard
A bed, a telephone, the cord
to the world
beyond the womb . . .
Here lovers meet, have met,
will meet again behind different faces
while the icy picures
look on,
seeing nothing.
Hotel rooms see nothing.
Business transacted,
prostitutes killed,
marriages silently shaken;
what happens here
is off the record;
there is no record
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poem by Erica Jong
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Colder
He was six foot four, and forty-six
and even colder than he thought he was
James Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks
Not that I cared about the other woman.
Those perfumed breasts with hearts
of pure rock salt.
Lot's wives-
all of them.
I didn't care
if they fondled him at parties,
eased him in at home
between a husband & a child,
sucked him dry
with vacuum cleaner kisses.
It was the coldness that I minded,
though he's warned me.
"I'm cold," He said- (as if that helped any).
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poem by Erica Jong
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The Poet as a Feeler of Pain
What makes a poet?
Many have tried to guess.
Is it a voice
like a conduit,
a plainspokenness to grief,
the hairs of the head
dancing on end,
the blood swarming
with the voices
of all those who have died,
will die,
& will also be born?
Is it a catch
in the throat
that awakens the eyes,
is it in the eyes themselves
or is it something
in the heart?
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poem by Erica Jong
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For Claudia, 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 the 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.
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poem by Erica Jong
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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,
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poem by Erica Jong
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You Hate the Telephone
You hate the telephone
but will not see me
face to face
so I am left
beseeching you
long-distance,
trying to thread our love
along the telephone poles
of Vermont,
trying to tunnel it
under the Atlantic
as if it were
a rare fossil
I'd unearthed,
or an offshore pipe
bearing precious oil.
But it is your face
I love,
your funny grin
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poem by Erica Jong
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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.
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poem by Erica Jong
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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
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poem by Erica Jong
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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.
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poem by Erica Jong
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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,
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poem by Erica Jong
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