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 fear of death?
Revelation?
Dwelling in the house of clouds
where you imagine
you once lived?
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poem by Erica Jong
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Nobody Believes
Nobody believes in love-
not even me.
Love is the thing
you wait
to end.
Love is the thing
that will not,
cannot work.
Love is the thing
they warn you of-
the dire parents,
the friends
with their dead
marriages,
their crushed hopes.
Nothing crushes hope
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poem by Erica Jong
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Wrinkles
For Naomi Lazard
Sometimes I can't wait until I look like Nadezhda Mandelstam.
-- Naomi Lazard
My friends are tired.
The ones who are married are tired
of being married.
The ones who are single are tired
of being single.
They look at their wrinkles.
The ones who are single attribute their wrinkles
to being single.
The ones who are married attribute their wrinkles
to being married.
They have very few wrinkles.
Even taken together,
they have very few wrinkles.
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poem by Erica Jong
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The Bed of the World
The great bed of the world
arching over graves
over Babi Yar
with its multitude 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.
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poem by Erica Jong
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Sleep
I love to go to sleep,
When bed takes me like a lover
wrapping my limbs in
cool linen, soothing
the fretfulness
of day glaring like
the Cyclops' eye
in a forehead
of furrows.
But I wake
always reluctantly, brushing
the dreamcrumbs
from my lids,
walking sideways underwater
like a crab
spilling coffee,
knocking the mug
to the floor
where it shatters
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poem by Erica Jong
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When I Am an Old Lady
When I am an old lady
the young men
will come to me
& sit trembling
at my trembling
feet
saying:
you must have been
beautiful
when you were young;
you must have been
a wonderful lover-
& perhaps
they will still feel
that current
which you say
passes from me
to you
& which you give back
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poem by Erica Jong
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Without Parachutes
The experience 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).
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poem by Erica Jong
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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
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poem by Erica Jong
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For Molly, Concerning God
Is God the one who eats the meat
off the bones of dead people?
-Molly Miranda Jong-Fast, age 3 1/2
God is the one,
Molly,
whether we call him
Him,
or Her,
treeform 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
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poem by Erica Jong
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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.
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poem by Erica Jong
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