Written by
Erica Jong |
I was sick of being a woman,
sick of the pain,
the irrelevant detail of sex,
my own concavity
uselessly hungering
and emptier whenever it was filled,
and filled finally
by its own emptiness,
seeking the garden of solitude
instead of men.
The white bed
in the green garden--
I looked forward
to sleeping alone
the way some long
for a lover.
Even when you arrived,
I tried to beat you
away with my sadness,
my cynical seductions,
and my trick of
turning a slave
into a master.
And all because
you made
my fingertips ache
and my eyes cross
in passion
that did not know its own name.
Bear, beast, lover
of the book of my body,
you turned my pages
and discovered
what was there
to be written
on the other side.
And now
I am blank
for you,
a tabula rasa
ready to be printed
with letters
in an undiscovered language
by the great press
of our love.
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Written by
Sylvia Plath |
No use whistling for Lyonnesse!
Sea-cold, sea-cold it certainly is.
Take a look at the white, high berg on his forehead-
There's where it sunk.
The blue, green,
Gray, indeterminate gilt
Sea of his eyes washing over it
And a round bubble
Popping upward from the mouths of bells
People and cows.
The Lyonians had always thought
Heaven would be something else,
But with the same faces,
The same places.
.
.
It was not a shock-
The clear, green, quite breathable atmosphere,
Cold grits underfoot,
And the spidery water-dazzle on field and street.
It never occurred that they had been forgot,
That the big God
Had lazily closed one eye and let them slip
Over the English cliff and under so much history!
They did not see him smile,
Turn, like an animal,
In his cage of ether, his cage of stars.
He'd had so many wars!
The white gape of his mind was the real Tabula Rasa.
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