Flying You Home - Erica Jong

"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 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 any more. Only the black hair

curled on your belly makes you real—

I draw black curls on all the men I write,

I don't even look anymore.

7

I thought of you in Istanbul.

Your Byzantine face,

thin lips & hollow cheeks,

the fanatical melting brown eyes.

In Hagia Sophia they're stripping down

the moslem plaster

to find mosaics underneath.

The pieces fit in place.

You'd have been a Saint.

8

I'm good at interiors.

Gossip, sharpening edges, kitchen poems—

& have no luck at all with maps.

It's because of being a woman 

& having everything inside.

I decorated the cave,

hung it with animal skins & woolens,

such soft floors,

that when you fell

you thought you fell on me.

You had a perfect sense of bearings

to the end,

were always pointing North.

9 

Flying you home—

good Christ—flying you home,

you were terrified.

You held my hand, I held

my father's hand & he 

filched pills from the psychiatrist

who'd come along for you.

The psychiatrist was 26 & scared.

He hoped I'd keep you calm.

& so we flew.

Hand in hand in hand in hand we flew.

[From:

Jong, E. (1977) Loveroot. London: Secker & Warburg. p73 - p77.]