Becoming Light by Erica Jong

years.”
    Gray days,
    the wind hobbling down sidestreets,
    I’m walking in a thirties photograph,
    the prehistoric age
    before my birth.
    This town was never bombed.
    Old ladies still wear funny shoes,
    long, seedy furs.
    They smell of camphor and camomile,
    old photographs.
    Nothing much happened here.
    A few jewelry shops changed hands.
    A brewery. Banks.
    The university put up a swastika, took it down.
    The students now chant HO CHI MINH & hate Americans
    on principle.
    Daddy wears a flyer’s cap
    & never grew old.
    He’s on the table with the teacakes.
    Mother & grandma are widows.
    They take care of things.
    It rains nearly every day;
    every day, they wash the windows.
    They cultivate jungles in the front parlors,
    lush tropics
    framed by lacy white curtains.
    They coax the earth with plant food, scrub the leaves.
    Each plant shines like a fat child.
    They hope for the sun,
    living in a Jewless world without men.

Student Revolution
    ( Heidelberg, 1969 )
    After the teach-in
    we smeared the walls with
    our solidarity,
    looked left, & saw
    Marx among the angels,
    singing the blues.
    The students march,
    I (spectator)
    follow.
    Here (as everywhere)
    the Polizei
    are clean, are clean.
    In Frankfurt,
    the whores lean out
    their windows, screaming:
    “Get a job—you dirty
    hippies!” Or words
    (auf Deutsch) to that effect.
    I’m also waiting
    for the Revolution,
    friends.
    Surely, my poems
    will get better.
    Surely, I’ll no longer
    fear my dreams.
    Surely I won’t murder
    my capitalist father
    each night
    just to inherit
    his love.

Flying You Home
    I only remember the onion, the egg and the boy. O that was me, said the madman.
    —Nicholas Moore
    1
    “I bite into an apple & then get bored
    before the second bite,” you said.
    You were also Samson. I had cut
    your hair & locked you up.
    Besides, your room was bugged.
    A former inmate left his muse
    spread-eagled on the picture window.
    In the glinting late-day sun
    we saw her huge & cross-eyed breasts appear
    diamond-etched
    against the slums of Harlem.
    You tongued your pills & cursed the residents.
    You called me Judas.
    You forgot I was a girl.
    2
    Your hands weren’t birds. To call
    them birds would be too easy.
    They drew circles around your ideas
    & your ideas were sometimes parabolas.
    That sudden Sunday you awoke
    & found yourself behind the looking glass,
    your hands perched on the breakfast table
    waiting for a sign.
    I had nothing to tell them.
    They conversed with the eggs.
    3
    We walked.
    Your automatic umbrella snapped
    into place above your head
    like a black halo.
    We thought of climbing down rain puddles
    as if they were manholes.
    You said the reflected buildings
    led to hell.
    Trees danced for us,
    cut-out people turned sideways
    & disappeared into their voices.
    The cities in our glasses took us in.
    You stood on a scale, heard the penny drop—
    but the needle was standing still!
    It proved that you were God.
    4
    The elevator opens & reveals me
    holding African violets.
    An hour later I vanish
    into a chasm whose dimensions
    are 23 hours.
    Tranquilized, brittle,
    you strut the corridors
    among the dapper young psychiatrists,
    the girls who weave rugs all day,
    unravel them all night,
    the obesity cases lost in themselves.
    You hum. You say you hate me.
    I would like to shake you.
    Remember how it happened?
    You were standing at the window
    speaking about flying.
    Your hands flew to my throat.
    When they came they found
    our arms strewn around the floor
    like broken toys.
    We both were crying.
    5
    You stick. Somewhere in a cellar of my mind,
    you stick. Fruit spoke to you
    before it spoke to me. Apples cried
    when you peeled them.
    Tangerines jabbered in Japanese.
    You stared into an oyster
    sucked out God.
    You were the hollow man,
    with Milton entering your left foot.
    6
    My first husband!—God—
    you’ve become an abstraction,
    a kind of idea. I can’t even hear
    your voice anymore. Only the black hair
    curled on your belly makes you