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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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