The Keys
Broken ivories
playing
the blue piano
of the sea.
We have come
from the bitter city
to heal ourselves.
We have come
looking for a patch of beach
not yet built into a fortress
of real-estate greed,
a coral reef
not yet picked clean
of buried treasure,
not yet bare of birds.
The first night in the Keys,
I dreamed I was a bird
soaring over a hilly city,
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poem by Erica Jong
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Alcestis on the Poetry Circuit
(In Memoriam Marina Tsvetayeva, Anna Wickham, Sylvia Plath, Shakespeare¹s sister, etc., etc.)
The best slave
does not need to be beaten.
She beats herself.
Not with a leather whip,
or with stick or twigs,
not with a blackjack
or a billyclub,
but with the fine whip
of her own tongue
& the subtle beating
of her mind
against her mind.
For who can hate her half so well
as she hates herself?
& who can match the finesse
of her self-abuse?
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poem by Erica Jong
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Venice, November, 1966
With his head full of Shakespearean tempests
and old notions of poetic justice,
he was ready with his elegies
the day the ocean sailed into the square.
'The sea,' he wrote, 'is a forgiving element,
and history only the old odor of blood.
She will come to rest on the soft floor
of the world, barnacled like a great pirate ship,
and blind fish-mouthing like girls before a glass-
will bump, perhaps, San Marco's brittle bones.'
Pleased with these images, he paused
and conjured visions of a wet apocalypse:
the blown church bobbing like a monstrous water toy,
Doge Dandolo's bronze horses from Byzantium
pawing the black waves, incredulous pigeons
hovering like gulls over the drowning square,
mosaic saints floating gently to pieces.
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poem by Erica Jong
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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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