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.
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poem by Erica Jong
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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 don¹t care which one I eat.
But the waiter expects a performance,
con brio. This is a ritual
solemn as wine-tasting or the Last Judgement.
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
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poem by Erica Jong
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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)
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poem by Erica Jong
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January in New York
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,
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poem by Erica Jong
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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.
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poem by Erica Jong
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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
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poem by Erica Jong
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To the Goddess
Goddess, I come to you
my neck wreathed with rosebuds,
my head filled with visions of infants,
my palms open to your silver nails,
my eyes open to your rays of illumination,
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.
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poem by Erica Jong
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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.
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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 last 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
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poem by Erica Jong
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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. . .
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poem by Erica Jong
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