Free Becoming Light by Erica Jong

soul.
    Buddha-like
    you sat before a Buddha;
    & the audience
    craned its neck
    to take you in.
    Freak show—
    visiting poet.
    You sat clothed
    in your thick
    imperious flesh.
    I wanted to comfort you
    & not to stare.
    Our words knew each other.
    That was enough.
    ♦
    Now you are dead
    of fascism & cancer—
    your books scattered,
    the oil cruet on the floor.
    The sea surges through your house
    at Isla Negra,
    & the jackboots
    walk on water.
    ♦
    Poet of cats & grapefruits,
    of elephant saints;
    poet of broken dishes
    & Machu Picchu;
    poet of panthers
    & pantheresses;
    poet of lemons,
    poet of lemony light.
    The flies swarm
    thicker than print on a page,
    & poetry blackens
    like overripe bananas.
    The fascists you hated,
    the communists you loved,
    obscure the light, the lemons
    with their buzzing.
    We were together
    on the side of light.
    We walked together
    though we never met.
    The eyes are not political,
    nor the tastebuds,
    & the flesh tastes salty always
    like the sea;
    & the sea
    turns back the flies.

Dear Colette
    Dear Colette,
    I want to write to you
    about being a woman
    for that is what you write to me.
    I want to tell you how your face
    enduring after thirty, forty, fifty…
    hangs above my desk
    like my own muse.
    I want to tell you how your hands
    reach out from your books
    & seize my heart.
    I want to tell you how your hair
    electrifies my thoughts
    like my own halo.
    I want to tell you how your eyes
    penetrate my fear
    & make it melt.
    I want to tell you
    simply that I love you—
    though you are “dead”
    & I am still “alive.”
    ♦
    Suicides & spinsters—
    all our kind!
    Even decorous Jane Austen
    never marrying,
    & Sappho leaping,
    & Sylvia in the oven,
    & Anna Wickham, Tsvetaeva, Sara Teasdale,
    & pale Virginia floating like Ophelia,
    & Emily alone, alone, alone….
    But you endure & marry,
    go on writing,
    lose a husband, gain a husband,
    go on writing,
    sing & tap dance
    & you go on writing,
    have a child & still
    you go on writing,
    love a woman, love a man
    & go on writing.
    You endure your writing
    & your life.
    ♦
    Dear Colette,
    I only want to thank you:
    for your eyes ringed
    with bluest paint like bruises,
    for your hair gathering sparks
    like brush fire,
    for your hands which never willingly
    let go,
    for your years, your child, your lovers,
    all your books…
    Dear Colette,
    you hold me
    to this life.

Dear Marys, Dear Mother, Dear Daughter
    Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
    author of
    A Vindication
    Of the Rights of Woman:
    Born 27 April, 1759:
    Died 10 September, 1797
    — MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT’S
    GRAVESTONE, PLACED BY
    WILLIAM GODWIN, 1798
    I was lonesome as a Crusoe .
    — MARY SHELLEY
    It is all over,
    little one, the flipping
    and overleaping, the watery
    somersaulting alone in the oneness
    under the hill, under
    the old, lonely bellybutton…
    — GALWAY KINNELL
    What terrified me will terrify others …
    — MARY SHELLEY
    1 / Needlepoint
    Mothers & daughters…
    something sharp
    catches in my throat
    as I watch my mother
    nervous before flight,
    do needlepoint—
    blue irises & yellow daffodils
    against a stippled woolen sky.
    She pushes the needle
    in & out
    as she once pushed me:
    sharp needle to the canvas of her life—
    embroidering her faults
    in prose & poetry,
    writing the fiction
    of my bitterness,
    the poems of my need.
    “You hate me,” she accuses,
    needle poised,
    “why not admit it?”
    I shake my head.
    The air is thick
    with love gone bad,
    the odor of old blood.
    If I were small enough
    I would suck your breast …
    but I say nothing,
    big mouth,
    filled with poems.
    Whatever love is made of—
    wool, blood, Sunday lamb,
    books of verse
    with violets crushed
    between the pages,
    tea with herbs,
    lemon juice for hair,
    portraits sketched of me asleep
    at nine months old—
    this twisted skein
    of multicolored wool,
    this dappled canvas
    or this page of print
    joins us
    like the twisted purple cord
    through which we first pulsed poems.
    Mother, what I feel for