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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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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To My Brother Poet, Seeking Peace
People wish to be settled. Only as long as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
-- Thoreau
My life has been
the instrument
for a mouth
I have never seen,
breathing wind
which comes
from I know not
where,
arranging and changing
my moods,
so as to make
an opening
for his voice.
Or hers.
Muse, White Goddess
mother with invisible
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The Death Of Goddesses
It used to be hard
for women,
snowed in their white lives,
white lies,
to write books
with that fine frenzy
which commends genius
to posterity,
yet estranges it
from its closest
friends.
Women were friends to all,
& being too friendly
they could not command
the unfriendly prerogatives
of genius,
though some were
geniuses still,
destroying
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poem by Erica Jong
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Blood & Honey
I began by loving women
& the love turned
to bitterness.
My mother, the bitter,
whose bitter lesson-
trust no one,
especially no male-
caused me to be naive
for too many years,
in mere rebellion
against that bitterness.
If she was Medea,
I would be Candide
& bleed in every sexual war,
& water my garden with menstrual blood
& grow the juiciest fruits.
(Like the woman
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Autumn Perspective
Now, moving in, cartons on the floor,
the radio playing to bare walls,
picture hooks left stranded
in the unsoiled squares where paintings were,
and something reminding us
this is like all other moving days;
finding the dirty ends of someone else's life,
hair fallen in the sink, a peach pit,
and burned-out matches in the corner;
things not preserved, yet never swept away
like fragments of disturbing dreams
we stumble on all day. . .
in ordering our lives, we will discard them,
scrub clean the floorboards of this our home
lest refuse from the lives we did not lead
become, in some strange, frightening way, our own.
And we have plans that will not tolerate
our fears-- a year laid out like rooms
in a new house--the dusty wine glasses
rinsed off, the vases filled, and bookshelves
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Mother
Ash falls on the roof
of my house.
I have cursed you enough
in the lines of my poems
& between them,
in the silences which fall
like ash-flakes
on the watertank
from a smog-bound sky.
I have cursed you
because I remember
the smell of Joy
on a sealskin coat
& because I feel
more abandoned than a baby seal
on an ice floe red
with it's mother's blood.
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To James Boswell in London
Boswell - you old rake - I have tried to imitate
your style; but it is no use; my dialogues are
all between my selves: and though I sit up late,
make endless notes and jottings that I hope will jar
my memory - it is in vain - for in the end
I have no Dr. Johnson but myself.
The difference is (I think) between our lives. You spend
the morning at the coffee house, nourish yourself
with talk and kippers before proceeding on to dine.
A ramble across London perks the appetite.
Every step is an adventure; the written line
distills itself from life. How can you help but write?
I consort with books while you see men, haunt the shelves
where your London lies buried. Your book once opened,
I become the ghost, a pale phantom who delves
into your life to borrow moments penned
two hundred years ago. I roam your world ignored -
while my own life, waiting outside, questions my motives.
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Dear Keats
Already six years past your age!
The steps in Rome,
the house near Hampstead Heath,
& all your fears
that you might cease to be
before your pen had glean'd. . . .
My dear dead friend,
you were the first to teach me
how the dust could sing.
I followed in your footsteps
up the Heath.
I listened hard
for Lethe's nightingale.
& now at 31, I want to live.
Oblivion holds no adolescent charms.
& all the 'souls of poets
dead & gone,'
& all the 'Bards
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