Throwing away my youth on duty
on ink, on guilt,
on applications...

I thought of you
in your mirrored room,
you with the huge open heart
pulsing like a womb which has just give birth,
pulsing like the beat in my head
before a poem starts.

I thought of you
& your charmed life,
your hassocks, waterbeds & sliding mirrors,
your closets full of beautiful faces,
& your men, your men

the way you could open & close
your legs without guilt,
the way you said yes & yes & yes,
the way you dealt with death & regret
as if they were cards,
the way you asked nothing
& everything came to you

Remember how we both loved
that girl from the Kingdom of Oz?*

She had thirty heads – all beautiful –
but just one dress

She kept her heads in a mirrored cupboard
opened with a ruby key.
I t was chained to her wrist.

She had my heart chained to her wrist!
I wanted to be her.

Though some of her heads were mad
she could never remember which
until she wore them,
& one had a horrible temper,
& one loved blood.

Can you imagine a girl
who put on the wrong head one day
& killed her body by mistake?

Can you imagine a girl
who would not believe she was beautiful
& kept opening her legs to the wrong men?

Can you imagine a girl
who cut off her head
to get rid of the guilt?

But no:
you are lying in a room
where everything is silver.
The ceiling is mirrored,
the floor is mirrored,
& men come out of the walls.

One by one, they make love to you
like princes climbing a glass mountain.
They admire your faces
& the several colors of your hair.
They admire your smooth pink feet
& your hands which have never known ink.
They kiss your fingers.

You are everywhere.
You can come all night
& never tire.

Your voices mist the mirrors
but you never write.

You have my children
& they fugue the world.

Someday when my work is done
I’ll come to you.

No one will be the wiser.

*Princess Langwidere in L. Frank Baum’s Ozma of Oz.

© Erica Mann Jong

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