Erica Jong (via famouspoetsandpoems.com)

Words have granted me great comfort these past few weeks: some have found me, and some I’ve shared with others. One of my favourite all time author/poets is Erica Jong who believes, as I do, that words can ultimately save the world (along peace, psychology, art and whiskey). Perhaps her best known novel, Fear of Flying (written when she was 31) literally sent shock waves across the globe with it’s raw and revealing portrayal of feminine sexuality, earning her respect from another notorious novelist, Henry Miller.

Her poetry, in my opinion, has been her greatest literary triumph. I discovered ‘Half-Lives‘ in a 2nd-hand book store in Nyack, NY (a village where I would later find myself in hospital) and fell forever in love with this epic poem:

Prologue/ The Evidence

‘The notion of emptiness generates passion.’ ~ Thoedore Roethke

1.
Evidence of life:
snapshots,
hundreds of split-seconds
when the eyes glazed over,
the hair stopped its growing,
the nails froze in fingertips,
the blood hung suspended
in its vessels—

while the small bloodships,
the red & white bloodboats
buoyed up & down at anchor
like the toys
of millionaires….

Evidence of life:
a split-second’s death
to live forever
in something called
a print.
A paparazzo life:
I shoot therefore I am.

2.
Why does life need evidence
of life?
We disbelieve it
even as we live.

The bloodboats gently rocking,
the skull opening every night
to dreams more vivid than itself,
more solid
than its own bones,
the brain flowering with petals,
stamens, pistils,
magical fruit
which reproduces
from its own juice,
which invents
its own mouth,
& makes itself anew
each night.

3.
Evidence of life?
My dreams.
The dreams which I write down.
The dreams which I relate
each morning with a solemn face
inventing as I go.

Evidence of life:
that we could meet for the first time,
open our scars and our stitches to each other,
weave our legs around
each other’s patchwork dreams
& try to salve each other’s wounds
with love–

if it was love.

(I am not sure at all
if love is salve
or just
a deeper kind of wound.
I do not think it matters.)

If it was lust or hunger
& not love,
if it was all that they accused us of
(that we accused ourselves)–
I do not think it matters.

4.
Evidence of love?
I imagine our two heads
sliced open like grapefruits,
pressed each half to half
& mingling acid juice
in search of sweet.

I imagine all my dreams
sliding out into your open skull—
as I were the poet,
you the reader.

I imagine all your dreams
pressed against my belly
like your sperm
& singing into me.

I imagine my two hands
cupped around your life
and stroking it.

I imagine your two hands
making whirlpools
in my blood,
then quelling them.

5.
I have no photograph of you.
At times I hardly can believe in you.
Except this ache,
this longing in my gut,
this emptiness which theorizes you
because if there is emptiness this deep,
there must be fullness somewhere.

My other half!
My life beyond this half-life!

Is life a wound
which dreams of being healed?

Is love a wound which deepens
as it dreams?

Do you exist?
Evidence:
these poems in which
I have been conjuring you,
this book which makes your absence palpable,
these longings printed black.
I am exposed.
I am a print of darkness
on a square of film.
I am a garbled dream
told by a breakfast-table liar.
I am a wound which has forgotten how to heal.

6.
& if it wasn’t love,
if you called me now
across the old echo chamber of the ocean
& said:
“Look, I never loved you,”
I would feel
a little like a fool perhaps,
& yet it wouldn’t matter.

My business is to always feel
a little like a fool
and speak of it.

& I am sure
that when we love
we are better than ourselves
& when we hate,
worse.

& even if we call it madness later
& scrawl four-letter words
across those outhouse walls
we call our skulls—
we stand revealed
by those sudden moments
when we come together.

7.
Evidence?
Or was it just my dream
waltzing with your dream?
My nightmare kissing yours?

When I awakened
did I walk with Jacob’s limp?
Did I sing a different song?
Did I find the inside of my palm
scarred as if
(for moments) it held fire?
Did my blood flow as riverwater flows
around a tree stump—
crooked, with a lilt?

What other evidence
did I need?