Becoming Light by Erica Jong Read Free Book Online Page B

nothing to tell me.
    I see her diving down
    into herself—
    past the bell-shaped jellyfish
    who toll for no one—
    & meaning to come back.
    ♦
    In London, in the damp
    of a London morning,
    I see her sitting,
    folding & unfolding herself,
    while the blood
    hammers like rain
    on her heart’s windows.
    This is her own country—
    the sea, the rain
    & death half rhyming
    with her father’s name.
    Obscene monosyllable,
    it lingers for a while
    on the roof
    of the mouth’s house.
    I stand here
    savoring the sound,
    like salt.
    ♦
    They thought your death
    was your last poem:
    a black book
    with gold-tooled cover
    & pages the color of ash.
    But I thought different,
    knowing how madness
    doesn’t believe
    in metaphor.
    When you began to feel
    the drift of continents
    beneath your feet,
    the sea’s suck,
    & each
    atom of the poisoned air,
    you lost
    the luxury of simile.
    Gull calls, broken shells,
    the quarried coast.
    This is where America ends,
    dropping off
    to the depths.
    Death comes
    differently in California.
    Marilyn stalled
    in celluloid,
    the frame stuck,
    & the light
    burning through.
    Bronze to her platinum,
    Ondine, Ariel,
    finally no one,
    what could we tell you
    after you dove down into yourself
    & were swallowed
    by your poems?

A Reading
    The old poet
    with his face full of lines,
    with iambs jumping in his hair like fleas,
    with all the revisions of his body
    unsaying him,
    walks to the podium.
    He is about to tell us
    how he came to this.

Imaginary Landscapes
    for my parents
    Who are these small determined figures
    with turbaned heads
    coming
    to doric temples
    in
    fifteenth-century galleons
    with
    medieval castles
    in the background?
    They speak
    & gesture in the halflight,
    bring
    cattle, parcels
    to the classic shore
    below the gothic hill.
    Sunlight moonlight twilight starlight
    gleams across
    a stagey sea.
    Clouds toss. Sails fill.
    Windlessly,
    what banners wave?
    Whose landscape
    is this mind?
    Whose bluish breasts became
    these castled hills?
    Whose darkness is
    this winter afternoon?
    Whose darkness is
    this darkening gallery?
    Turn softly mind, wind,
    Claude Lorrain,
    Turner’s making
    light of Venice,
    showing
    his true
    colors.

The Saturday Market
    For Alexander Mitscherlich
    Lumbering down
    in the early morning clatter
    from farms
    where the earth was hard all winter,
    the market women bear
    grapes blue as the veins
    of fair-skinned women,
    cherries dark as blood,
    roses strewn like carnage
    on makeshift altars.
    They come
    in ancient rattling trucks
    which sprout geraniums,
    are stained
    with strawberries.
    Their fingers thick
    & thorn-pricked,
    their huge smock-pockets
    jingling pennies,
    they walk,
    heavy goddesses,
    while the market
    blossoms into bleeding
    all round them.
    Currants which glitter
    like Christmas ornaments
    are staining
    their wooden boxes.
    Cherries, grapes—
    everything
    seems to be bleeding!
    I think
    how a sentimental
    German poet
    might have written
    that the cut rose
    mourns the garden
    & the grapes
    their Rhineland vineyard
    (where the crooked vines
    stretch out their arms
    like dancers)
    for this
    is a sentimental country
    & Germans
    are passionate gardeners
    who view with humanity
    the blights of roses,
    the adversities of vineyards.
    But I am not fooled.
    This bleeding is, no doubt,
    in the beholder’s eye,
    & if
    to tend a garden
    is to be civilized,
    surely this country
    of fat cabbages
    & love-lavished geraniums
    would please
    an eighteenth-century
    philosopher.
    Two centuries, however,
    buzz above my head
    like hornets over fruit.
    I stuff my mouth with cherries
    as I watch
    the thorn-pricked fingers
    of the market women
    lifting & weighing,
    weighing, weighing.

The Heidelberg Landlady
    Because she lost her father
    in the First World War,
    her husband in the Second,
    we don’t dispute
    “There’s no Gemütlichkeit in America.”
    We’re winning her heart
    with filter cigarettes.
    Puffing, she says,
    “You can’t judge a country
    by just twelve