Free Becoming Light by Erica Jong Page B

fetus flips its flippers
    in the womb
    & she circles in the belly of the tank.
    The last calf
    beat her brains out
    minutes after birth
    & this one died unborn…
    Fourteen months in the womb,
    fourteen months to enter
    the world of whaledom
    through a tank in Coney Island.
    Not worth it,
    the calf decides,
    & dies,
    taking along its mother.
    ♦
    The whales are friendly, social animals,
    & produce big, brainy babies;
    produce them one by one
    in the deep arctic waters,
    produce them painfully
    through months of mating
    & pregnancies that last more than a year.
    They croon to their unborn calves
    in poetry—whale poetry
    which only a few humans
    have been privileged to hear.
    Melville died for the privilege
    & so will I
    straining my ears
    all the way to Coney Island.
    ♦
    Dear Francis, dead at ten
    in your second pregnancy,
    in the seventh year of captivity…
    Was it weariness of the tank, the cage,
    the zoo-prison of marriage?
    Or was it loneliness—
    the loneliness of pregnant whales?
    Or was it nostalgia for the womb,
    the arctic waste,
    the belly of your own cold mother?
    When a whale dies at sixteen hundred pounds
    we must make big moans.
    When a whale dies with an unborn baby
    of one hundred and fifty pounds—
    a small elegy is not enough;
    we must weep loud enough
    to be heard
    all the way to Coney Island.
    ♦
    Why am I weeping
    into The New York Times
    for a big beluga whale
    who could never have been
    my sister?
    Why am I weeping for a baby whale
    who died happy
    in the confines of the womb?
    Because when the big-brained babies
    die, we are all dying;
    & the ferns live on
    shivering
    in the warm wind.

For My Sister, Against Narrowness
    Narrowing life because of the fears,
    narrowing it between the dust motes,
    narrowing the pink baby
    between the green-limbed monsters,
    & the drooling idiots,
    & the ghosts of Thalidomide infants,
    narrowing hope,
    always narrowing hope.
    Mother sits on one shoulder hissing:
    Life is dangerous .
    Father sits on the other sighing:
    Lucky you .
    Grandmother, grandfather, big sister:
    You’ll die if you leave us,
    you’ll die if you ever leave us .
    Sweetheart, baby sister,
    you’ll die anyway
    & so will I.
    Even if you walk the wide greensward,
    even if you
    & your beautiful big belly
    embrace the world of men & trees,
    even if you moan with pleasure,
    & smoke the sweet grass
    & feast on strawberries in bed,
    you’ll die anyway—
    wide or narrow,
    you’re going to die.
    As long as you’re at it,
    die wide.
    Follow your belly to the green pasture.
    Lie down in the sun’s dapple.
    Life is not as dangerous
    as mother said.
    It is more dangerous,
    more wide.

For My Husband
    You sleep in the darkness,
    you with the back I love
    & the gift of sleeping
    through my noisy nights of poetry.
    I have taken other men into my thoughts
    since I met you.
    I have loved parts of them.
    But only you sleep on through the darkness
    like a mountain where my house is planted,
    like a rock on which my temple stands,
    like a great dictionary holding every word—
    even some
    I have never spoken.
    You breathe.
    The pages of your dreams are riffled
    by the winds of my writing.
    The pillow creases your cheek
    as I cover pages.
    Element in which I swim
    or fly,
    silent muse, backbone, companion—
    it is unfashionable
    to confess to marriage—
    yet I feel no bondage
    in this air we share.

Cheever’s People
    These beautifully grown men. These hungerers.
    Look at them looking!
    They’re overdrawn on all accounts but hope
    & they’ve missed
    (for the hundredth time) the express
    to the city of dreams
    & settled, sighing, for a desperate local;
    so who’s to blame them
    if they swim through swimming pools of twelve-
    year-old scotch, or fall
    in love with widows (other than their wives)
    who suddenly can’t ride
    in elevators? In that suburb of elms
    & crabgrass (to which
    the angel banished them) nothing is more real
    than last night’s empties.
    So, if they pack up, stuff their vitals
    in a