Becoming Light by Erica Jong Read Free Book Online Page A

money.

The Commandments
    You don’t really want to be a poet. First of all, if you’re a woman, you have to be three times as good as any of the men. Secondly, you have to fuck everyone. And thirdly, you hare to be dead.
    —Mark Strand, in conversation
    If a woman wants to be a poet,
    she should sleep near the moon with her face open;
    she should walk through herself studying the landscape;
    she should not write her poems in menstrual blood.
    If a woman wants to be a poet,
    she should run backwards circling the volcano;
    she should feel for the movement along her faults;
    she should not get a Ph.D. in seismography.
    If a woman wants to be a poet,
    she should not sleep with uncircumcised manuscripts;
    she should not write odes to her abortions;
    she should not make stew of old unicorn meat.
    If a woman wants to be a poet,
    she should read French cookbooks and Chinese vegetables;
    she should suck on French poets to freshen her breath;
    she should not masturbate in writing seminars.
    If a woman wants to be a poet,
    she should peel back the hair from her eyeballs;
    she should listen to the breathing of sleeping men;
    she should listen to the spaces between that breathing.
    If a woman wants to be a poet,
    she should not write her poems with a dildo;
    she should pray that her daughters are women;
    she should forgive her father for his bravest sperm.

Aging
    (balm for a 27th birthday)
    Hooked on for two years now on wrinkle creams        creams for
    crowsfeet         ugly lines (if only there were one!)
    any perfumed grease        which promises         youth         beauty
    not truth        but all I need on earth
    I’ve been studying    how women age
    how
    it starts around the eyes        so you can tell
    a woman of 22 from one of 28 merely by
    a faint scribbling near the lids        a subtle crinkle
    a fine line
    extending from the fields of vision
    this
    in itself is not unbeautiful     promising
    as it often does
    insights which clear-eyed 22 has no inkling of
    promising          certain sure-thighed things in bed
    certain fingers on your spine & lids
    but
    it’s only the beginning        as ruin proceeds downward
    lingering for a while around the mouth        hardening the smile
    into prearranged patterns (irreversible!)   writing furrows
    from the wings of the nose         (oh nothing much at first
    but “showing promise”        like your early poems
    of deepening)
    & plotting lower to the corners of the mouth        drooping them
    a little        like the tragic mask        though not at all grotesque
    as yet         & then as you sidestep          into the 4th decade
    beginning to crease the neck     (just slightly)
    though the breasts below
    especially
    When they’re small (like mine) may stay high far
    into the thirties
    still the neck will give you away        & after that the chin
    which        though you may snip it back & hike it up under
    your earlobes will never quite love your bones as it once did
    though
    the belly may be kept firm through numerous pregnancies
    by means of sit-ups        jogging          dancing          (think of Russian
    ballerinas)
    & the cunt
    as far as I know is ageless        possibly immortal
    becoming simply
    more open        more quick to understand        more dry-eyed
    than at 22
    which
    after all          is what you were dying for        (as you ravaged
    islands of turtles        beehives        oysterbeds        the udders
    of cows)
    desperate to censor changes which you simply might have let play
    over you         lying back         listening         opening yourself
    letting the years make love the only way        (poor blunderers)
    they know

In Sylvia Plath Country
    for Grace
    The skin of the sea
    has