Becoming Light by Erica Jong Page B

stiffens on the sheet.
    At night the childhood walls
    are streaked with blood—
    until the darkness seems awash with red
    & children sleep behind two blood-branched lids.
    ♦
    “My imagination is a monastery
    & I am its monk…”
    At five & twenty,
    very far from home,
    death picked you up
    & sorted to a pip.
    & 15 decades later,
    your words breathe:
    syllables of blood.
    A strange transfusion
    for my feverish verse.
    I suck your breath,
    your rhythms & your blood,
    & all my fiercest dreams are sighed away.
    I send you love,
    dear Keats,
    I send you peace.
    Since flesh can’t stay
    we keep the breath aloft.
    Since flesh can’t stay,
    we pass the words along.

Becoming a Nun
    For Jennifer Josephy
    On cold days
    it is easy to be reasonable,
    to button the mouth against kisses,
    dust the breasts
    with talcum powder
    & forget
    the red pulp meat
    of the heart.
    On those days
    it beats
    like a digital clock—
    not a beat at all
    but a steady whirring
    chilly as green neon,
    luminous as numerals in the dark,
    cool as electricity.
    & I think:
    I can live without it all—
    love with its blood pump,
    sex with its messy hungers,
    men with their peacock strutting,
    their silly sexual baggage,
    their wet tongues in my ear
    & their words like little sugar suckers
    with sour centers.
    On such days
    I am zipped in my body suit,
    I am wearing seven league red suede boots,
    I am marching over the cobblestones
    as if they were the heads of men,
    & I am happy
    as a seven-year-old virgin
    holding Daddy’s hand.
    Don’t touch.
    Don’t try to tempt me with your ripe persimmons.
    Don’t threaten me with your volcano.
    The sky is clearer when I’m not in heat,
    & the poems
    are colder.

Empty
    …who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?
    —Virginia Woolf
    Every month,
    the reminder of emptiness
    so that you are tuned
    to your bodyharp,
    strung out on the harpsichord
    of all your nerves
    & hammered bloody blue
    as the crushed fingers
    of the woman pianist
    beaten by her jealous lover.
    Who was she?
    Someone I invented
    for this poem,
    someone I imagined…
    Never mind,
    she is me, you—
    tied to that bodybeat,
    fainting on the rack of blood,
    moving to the metronome—
    empty, empty, empty.
    No use.
    The blood is thicker
    than the roots of trees,
    more persistent than my poetry,
    more baroque than her bruised music.
    It gilds the sky above the Virgin’s head.
    It turns the lilies white.
    Try to run:
    the blood still follows you.
    Swear off children,
    seek a quiet room
    to practice your preludes & fugues.
    Under the piano,
    the blood accumulates;
    eventually it floats you both away.
    Give in.
    Babies cry & music is your life.
    Darling, you were born to bleed
    or rock.
    & the heart breaks
    either way.

Egyptology
    I am the sphinx.
    I am the woman buried in sand
    up to her chin.
    I am waiting for an archaeologist
    to unearth me,
    to dig out my neck & my nipples,
    bare my claws
    & solve my riddle.
    No one has solved my riddle
    since Oedipus.
    ♦
    I face the pyramids which rise
    like angular breasts
    from the dry body of Egypt.
    My fertile river is flowing down below—
    a lovely lower kingdom.
    Every woman should have a delta
    with such rich silt—
    brown as the buttocks
    of Nubian queens.
    ♦
    O friend, why have you come to Egypt?
    Aton & Yahweh
    are still feuding.
    Moses is leading his people
    & speaking of guilt.
    The voice out of the volcano
    will not be still.
    ♦
    A religion of death,
    a woman buried alive.
    For thousands of years
    the sand drifted over my head.
    My sex was a desert,
    my hair more porous than pumice,
    & nobody sucked my lips
    to make me tell.
    ♦
    The pyramid breasts, though huge,
    will never sag.
    In the center of each one,
    a king lies buried.
    In the center of each one,
    a darkened chamber…
    a tunnel,
    dead men’s bones,
    malignant gold.

Parable of the Four-Poster
    Because she wants to touch him,
    she moves away.
    Because she wants to talk