Erica Jong - Mother lyrics

Ash falls on the roof of my house. I have cursed you enough in the lines of my poems & between them, in the silences which fall like ash-flakes on the watertank from a smog-bound sky. I have cursed you because I remember the smell of Joy on a sealskin coat & because I feel more abandoned than a baby seal on an ice floe red with it's mother's blood. I have cursed you as I walked & prayed on a concrete terrace high above the street because whatever I pulled down with my bruised hand from the bruising sky, whatever lovely plum came to my mouth you envied & spat out. Because you saw me in your image, because you favored me, you punished me. It was only a form of you my poems were seeking. Neither of us knew. For years we lived together in a single skin. We shared fur coats. We hated each other as the soul hates the body for being weak, as the mind hates the stomach for needing food, as one lover hates the other. I kicked in the pouch of your theories like a baby kangaroo. I believed you on Marx, on Darwin, on Tolstoy & Shaw. I said I loved Pushkin (you loved him). I vowed Monet was better than Bosch. Who cared? I would have said nonsense to please you & frequently did. This took the form, of course, of fighting you. We fought so gorgeously! We fought like one boxer & his punching bag. We fought like mismatched twins. We fought like the secret sharer & his shade. Now we're apart. Time doesn't heal the baby to the womb. Separateness is real & keeps on growing. One by one the mothers dropp away, the lovers leave, the babies outgrow clothes. Some get insomnia - the poet's disease - & sit up nights nursing at the nipples of their pens. I have made hot milk & kissed you where you are. I have cursed my curses. I have cleared the air. & now I sit here writing, breathing you.