Because I Would Not Admit
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
-William Blake
Because I would not admit
that I had nurtured
an enemy within my breast-
a lover who wanted to gnaw
my secret rose,
a lover who wanted to press me
between the covers of a book,
then burn it,
a lover-usurper who wanted
to take my soul-
I nearly died,
running my car upon rocks
like a badly steered sloop,
crashing into trees
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poem by Erica Jong
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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
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poem by Erica Jong
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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.
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poem by Erica Jong
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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
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poem by Erica Jong
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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).
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poem by Erica Jong
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In the Glass-Bottomed Boat
In the glass-bottomed boat
of our lives, we putter along
gazing at the 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.
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poem by Erica Jong
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Continental Divide
Handcuffed by time,
I travel across this broad
beautiful America-
mesas, deserts,
peaks with clouds caught
upon them,
the Continental Divide
where a dropp of rain
must decide
whether to roll east or west
like the rest of us.
I speak to a group
of avid, aging Californians
about daring to embrace
the second half of life.
The passions of the old
are deeper
than any wells
the young can plumb.
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poem by Erica Jong
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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-
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poem by Erica Jong
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Henry James in the Heart of the City
We have a small sculpture of Henry James on our terrace in New York City.
Nothing would surprise him.
The beast in the jungle was what he saw--
Edith Wharton's obfuscating older brother. . .
He fled the demons
of Manhattan
for fear they would devour
his inner ones
(the ones who wrote the books)
& silence the stifled screams
of his protagonists.
To Europe
like a wandering Jew--
WASP that he was--
but with the Jew's
outsider's hunger. . .
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poem by Erica Jong
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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,
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poem by Erica Jong
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