Read Online Becoming Light by Erica Jong - Free Book Online

the silver jaws of the stapler
    & the lecherous kiss of the mucilage,
    & the unctuousness of rubber cement
    before it dries.
    I have been afraid of telephones,
    have put my mouth to their stale tobacco breath,
    have been jarred to terror
    by their jangling midnight music,
    & their sudden blackness
    even when they are white.
    I have been afraid in elevators
    amid the satin hiss of cables
    & the silky lisping of air conditioners
    & the helicopter blades of fans.
    I have seen time killed in the office jungles
    of undeclared war.
    My fear has crept into the paper guillotine
    & voyaged to the Arctic Circle of the water cooler.
    My fear has followed me into the locked Ladies Room,
    & down the iron fire stairs
    to the postage meter.
    I have seen the mailroom women like lost letters
    frayed around the edges.
    I have seen the Xerox room men
    shuffling in & out among each other
    like cards in identical decks.
    I have come to tell you I have survived.
    I bring you chains of paperclips instead of emeralds.
    I bring you lottery tickets instead of poems.
    I bring you mucilage instead of love.
    I lay my body out before you on the desk.
    I spread my hair amid a maze of rubber stamps.
    RUSH. SPECIAL DELIVERY. DO NOT BEND .
    I am open—will you lick me like an envelope?
    I am bleeding—will you kiss my paper cuts?

Alcestis on the Poetry Circuit
    (In Memoriam Marina Tsvetayeva, Anna Wickham, Sylvia Plath, Shakespeare’s sister, etc., etc.)
    The best slave
    does not need to be beaten.
    She beats herself.
    Not with a leather whip,
    or with stick or twigs,
    not with a blackjack
    or a billyclub,
    but with the fine whip
    of her own tongue
    & the subtle beating
    of her mind
    against her mind.
    For who can hate her half so well
    as she hates herself?
    & who can match the finesse
    of her self-abuse?
    Years of training
    are required for this.
    Twenty years
    of subtle self-indulgence,
    self-denial;
    until the subject
    thinks herself a queen
    & yet a beggar—
    both at the same time.
    She must doubt herself
    in everything but love.
    She must choose passionately
    & badly.
    She must feel lost as a dog
    without her master.
    She must refer all moral questions
    to her mirror.
    She must fall in love with a Cossack
    or a poet.
    She must never go out of the house
    unless veiled in paint.
    She must wear tight shoes
    so she always remembers her bondage.
    She must never forget
    she is rooted in the ground.
    Though she is quick to learn
    & admittedly clever,
    her natural doubt of herself
    should make her so weak
    that she dabbles brilliantly
    in half a dozen talents
    & thus embellishes
    but does not change
    our life.
    If she’s an artist
    & comes close to genius,
    the very fact of her gift
    should cause her such pain
    that she will take her own life
    rather than best us.
    & after she dies, we will cry
    & make her a saint.

Mother
    Ash falls on the roof
    of my house.
    I have cursed you enough
    in the lines of my poems
    & between them,
    in the silences which fall
    like ash-flakes
    on the watertank
    from a smog-bound sky.
    I have cursed you
    because I remember
    the smell of Joy
    on a sealskin coat
    & because I feel
    more abandoned than a baby seal
    on an ice floe red
    with its mother’s blood.
    I have cursed you
    as I walked & prayed
    on a concrete terrace
    high above the street
    because whatever I pulled down
    with my bruised hand
    from the bruising sky,
    whatever lovely plum
    came to my mouth
    you envied
    & spat out.
    Because you saw me in your image,
    because you favored me,
    you punished me.
    It was only a form of you
    my poems were seeking.
    Neither of us knew.
    For years
    we lived together in a single skin.
    We shared fur coats.
    We hated each other
    as the soul hates the body
    for being weak,
    as the mind hates the stomach
    for needing food,
    as one lover hates the other.
    I kicked
    in the pouch of your theories
    like a baby kangaroo.
    I believed you
    on Marx, on Darwin,
    on Tolstoy & Shaw.
    I said I loved Pushkin
    (you loved him).
    I vowed Monet
    was better