Give me that! Give me that!
Okay, go and get it.
She fell

I made this up from nothing. 
It’s not myself I sing, 
or love, or anything 

In a loft facing a parking lot
   on a main drag of the tired
southend, lives my friend

In the beginning of my love wild hearts and trees. Greenness. The waves
at the end of the street. Dynamite proposals. To be a man,
or a white thing crawling through nuns’ dreams. In

Of course it’s a poem no man could withstand, all that forbidding power
Of the glance and the long sweetness of the slow analysis, 
Sweetness that drew him: 
                                         into the gristle of seeds, 

On cold days
it is easy to be reasonable,
to button the mouth against kisses,

I, Erica Jong, in the midst of my life,
        having had two parents, two sisters,
        two husbands, two books of poems

For I will consider my dog Poochkin
(& his long-lost brothers, Chekarf & Dogstoyevsky).
For he is the reincarnation of a great canine poet.

My friends are tired.
The ones who are married are tired
of being married.

My father was a forester in the Alpine woods
and also in the Andes. He roamed about the
under brush, rode a horse and carried a thin