Becoming Light by Erica Jong Page A

Russian novel.
    Dearest man-in-the moon,
    I used to fear moonlight
    thinking her my mother.
    I used to dread nights
    when the moon was full.
    I used to scream
    “Pull down the shade!”
    because the moonface leered at me,
    because I felt her mocking,
    because my fear lived in me
    like rats in a wheel of cheese.
    You have eaten out my fear.
    You have licked
    the creamy inside of my moon.
    You have kissed
    the final crescent of my heart
    & made it full.

Dear Keats
    For Howard Moss
    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
    of Passion & Mirth”
    cannot make death—
    its echo, its damp earth—
    resemble birth.
    ♦
    You died in Rome—
    in faltering sunlight—
    Bernini’s watery boat still sinking
    in the fountain in the square below.
    When Severn came to say
    the roses bloomed,
    you did not “glut thy sorrow,”
    but you wept—
    you wept for them
    & for your posthumous life.
    & yet we all lead posthumous lives somehow.
    The broken lyre,
    the broken lung,
    the broken love.
    Our names are writ in newsprint
    if not water.
    “Don’t breathe on me—” you cried,
    “it comes like ice.”
    ♦
    Last words.
    (I can’t imagine mine.
    Perhaps some muttered dream,
    some poem, some curse.)
    Three months past 25,
    you lived on milk.
    They reeled you backward
    in the womb of love.
    ♦
    A tepid February Roman Spring.
    Fruit trees in bloom
    & Hampstead still in snow
    & Fanny Brawnereceives a hopeful note
    when you are two weeks dead.
    A poet’s life:
    always awaiting mail.
    ♦
    For God’s sake
    kick against the pricks!
    There aren’t very many roses.
    Your life was like an hourglass
    with no sand.
    The words slid through
    & rested under glass;
    the flesh decayed
    to moist Italian clay.
    ♦
    At autopsy,
    your lungs were wholly gone.
    Was that from too much singing?
    Too many rifts of ore?
    You spent your life breath
    breathing life in words.
    But words return no breath
    to those who write.
    Letters, Life, & Literary Remains…
    “I find that I cannot exist without poetry….”
    “O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”
    “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth….”
    “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us….”
    “Sancho will invent a Journey heavenwards as well as anybody….”
    “Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul.”
    “Why should we kick against the Pricks when we can walk on Roses?”
    “Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses….”
    “Until we are sick, we understand not….”
    “Sorrow is Wisdom….”
    “Wisdom is folly….”
    ♦
    Too wise
    & yet not wise enough
    at 25.
    Sick, you understood
    & understanding
    were too weak to write.
    Proved on the pulse: poetry.
    If sorrow is wisdom
    & wisdom is folly
    then too much sorrow
    is folly.
    I find that I cannot exist without sorrow
    & I find that sorrow
    cannot exist without poetry….
    What the imagination seizes as beauty
    must be poetry….
    What the imagination seizes must be…
    ♦
    You claimed no lust for fame
    & yet you burned.
    “The faint conceptions I have of poems to come brings
    the blood frequently into my forehead.”
    I burn like you
    until it often seems
    my blood will break
    the boundaries of my brain
    & issue forth in one tall fountain
    from my skull.
    ♦
    A spume of blood from the forehead: poetry.
    A plume of blood from the heart: poetry.
    Blood from the lungs: alizarin crimson words.
    ♦
    “I will not spoil my love of gloom
    by writing an Ode to Darkness….”
    The blood turns dark;
    it